by Kit Reed
I started to cry.
“Pretty is as pretty does, Charlotte. Remember, pretty is as pretty does.”
If she could see what time has done to me and to my daughter her simulacrum, oh, oh, my! I wanted her to die. She lived on. Then Little Manette fell into her hands. She was my daughter, but Mother named her little instrument of revenge.
Given family resources and her station, Mother was presented at St. James’s in London, but that was before the war. The house on Tradd Street was the same when it ended, but everything else had changed. At the end of the coming season, I would be presented at the St. Cecilia Society Ball. Douglas Revenaugh would be my escort. He was the most highly placed of Jared’s friends, and if it went well enough … Damn you Mother, with your expectations. I could never measure up.
She saw to it that I had a pretty dress for every luncheon, every tea dance, every musicale because, Mother explained, this was my introduction to society. She took over my life in an orgy of preparation. Walk this way, practice modesty of the eyes, men avoid girls who are too direct. Unless they’re too attractive for their own good, and then. Just guard yourself Missy, guard yourself! Don’t do this, never say that, what would people think? Dress for the occasion, and in the name of our Savior, do not embarrass me.
I changed costumes twice, sometimes three times in a day. It was exhausting. There were more than a dozen parties. I was expected to be charming but not too charming at these events, I must play the part life wrote for me at every one of them and do all this smiling, smiling, whereas Jared slipped into the Citadel like a sword into a sheath.
I let William Robichaux find me at the St. Cecilia Ball; it wasn’t hard, and nature did the rest. He was a nice man. Older, clumsy and heavy-handed, but he kept his place. We had a girl, he was very sweet about it but I knew it was a disappointment. To be honest, I was disappointed too, and so was she. My daughter tore me apart in her rush to separate from me. I bled for months. The minute they put that child into my arms, she went rigid and hatred poured out of her in a long, unbroken screech. Then her tiny fists knotted and the battle began.
Mother never liked me. That day she grew fangs. In her extreme vanity, when the midwife came out into the hall for William, Mother pushed him aside like a chair that was in her way. I heard her: “My girl needs me!”
That woman rushed into the room where I lay sobbing, exhausted by the raging fury I could not contain. She descended on my child like the bad fairy and stole her soul before I knew, and before I could stop her, she stamped and sealed the vile transaction with her own name.
“Oh, my sweet baby,” she said; I knew she didn’t mean me. Then she seized the writhing bundle, and in naming her, Manette Patricia Millard Ware of the Charleston Wares claimed my frantic first child for her own. The baby’s body unclenched to the tune of Mother crooning, “My very own Little Manette.”
I was too ravaged by the shock to stop this transaction, and it was a transaction. Something dark passed between them when Mother breathed her given name into my daughter’s open mouth. “Hush-hush, my darling, hush-hush, sweet Little Manette.”
In an instant the baby fell silent, and giddy with relief, I thought, Thank God.
I didn’t know!
William was happy that our second child was a boy, and I was relieved because my darling Billy curled up in my arms. At last, a baby I could love! I thought well, that’s that, but with men it never is. Never mind, he was a banker, and he was well fixed. We were invited to all the best places and as for the physical particulars between us, William was a gentleman in all things, even that. Then he died of the Spanish flu. Little Manette was three years old and my sweet little Billy was two.
Never mind, William was a banker. Of course he’d have put away enough to see us through. By that time Margaret was coming around to take my daughter over to Tradd Street on most afternoons— to ease my lot, Mother said after William died, but that was not what she meant. I was too distracted to notice, or too blind to see what she was doing, my mother, the consummate lady.
What she had already done.
Thank God Jared’s death sent her into a decline. An explosion, wherever the army sent him in that awful war. It was simple enough to send Little Manette to Tradd Street to comfort Mother after her terrible loss. It was my way of pretending that I cared for her, when I didn’t care at all. In fact, I was happy to let my daughter sit in my mother’s parlor drinking cambric tea while I cuddled my son. Sweet Billy was my favorite, and they both knew. He settled into my arms like a ball into a socket, a hand into a glove.
I loved Little Manette but I never liked her. Mother did. My daughter was her beautiful doll. She was happy too. She came home from these visits with chocolate smears on her smug little face and some trinket from Mother’s jewel box— her cameo necklace, her jade bracelet, the ruby brooch I always wanted, my grandfather’s signet ring.
Despite my best efforts, Little Manette was everything my mother had wasted a hundred thousand words trying to make of me. A perfect lady. She wore a size four and a half shoe and her bare foot never touched the ground. Could I have stopped the process if I’d known? To be honest, if I did know what was going on in the parlor at Tradd Street, I didn’t care. I was happy to have the girl safely occupied. I thought: one less thing to worry about, and I had Billy. He was my sunny, sweet, beautiful boy. His path led to Porter and the Citadel, a happy future ensured, and I thought it was, until. Until!
I can’t. Not now.
William’s brothers took care of the money. After the funeral they sat me down and warned me to be frugal and I was, I know I was, and in spite of Little Manette and her incessant demands, I believed I had enough to send her to Ashley Hall which I did, and on the days when I left her at school all the air rushed out of me and my heart eased.
When Mother invited her to stay on Tradd Street on schooldays because it was that much closer I said, “Of course!” and everything went smoothly for a time. Then William’s brothers let me know that they had been carrying most of my expenses ever since his death and what little we had left was almost gone.
I left the William Robichaux house in the hands of his brothers, the banker and the lawyer, in exchange for what seemed at the time like a fair amount. By that time Mother had taken to her bed. With Jared gone and Mother in a decline, I assumed the house on Tradd Street would be mine to rule.
Until Little Manette met me at the door with Margaret behind her; she was sixteen, with her head high and her hair caught up with not a single stray curl. So mannered. So beautifully groomed. My daughter showed me into the house with a sweep of her hand. Quite the lady, with Mother’s garnet pendant swinging between her breasts: Little Manette, looking down her elegant nose. “Well, Mother. It’s about time!” Then I understood all at once and exactly how the Manettes had become what they were. My child treated Margaret like a slave. “A set tea for company, Margaret. On the veranda, with proper linens. Lapsang souchong and those biscuits from London. Raspberries and clotted cream.”
I’d never seen Margaret angry. “Yes, Miss Manette.”
My daughter called after her. “Oh, and Margaret, set the table for three. Your mistress is coming down. The Clayton family damask and the Minton tonight, and Great Grandmother Ware’s crystal, of course. Tell cook.” I wanted to turn on the girl and snatch her bald-headed, but she was too old to discipline. Too much of a lady, every line in her body a warning: ladies don’t.
Then Mother’s mannered puppet showed me around the house!
“And that,” she said as we came to the sitting room. She gestured at the mahogany overmantel with the French prisoner’s painting of Fort Sumter set into the wood, “Well, the gold is behind one of those panels, Mama just never found out where.”
“Mama?”
She raked me with a look that I knew at once. So condescending. So careless of everything but herself. “I suppose she was ‘Mother’ to you, Mother.”
Our futures were set in stone. I wonder if my mother
knew what she had unleashed.
CHAPTER 5
Ivy
Such a sweet boy. Sweet man, I suppose, a little bit older than our Randolph when he ran away; poor boy, we all knew he left because of Father. New Little Elena and that boy were off somewhere and I fought with Iris until she sighed and aimed me at the head of the little ramp outside the great door. She opened it with that nasty snarl of hers and gave me an extra push. “You want to go outside? OK, go outside and stay there until the cows come home!”
As though I had a choice. When I woke up crippled I wanted to die, but I haven’t. I’ve been not dying for so long now that I don’t think I can. None of us can. I don’t know about the others, but I know we’ve been around for too long, way too long.
Never mind, I have a friend! He came at just the right time the other day, when Iris got mad at me, so she pushed me outside too hard. Scooter and I shot down that ramp so fast that we lost our equilibrium. We tried to turn but our steering wheel seized up and we kept rolling until we ran smack into the cement urn with Rose’s dying hydrangea at the top of our front steps. We were hanging by the left rear wheel of my poor Scooter, another inch and we’d have rolled straight down those stairs to our death on the flagstone walk, and what a liberation that would be!
Why, I could just hear Iris wailing, “Ivy Marie Ellis, look what you’ve done to yourself!” but I knew what she would be thinking while she and Rosemary waited for 911, which they would take their own sweet time getting around to calling.
Finally.
I could almost hear them celebrating after the ambulance took me away.
You want me dead, you bitch? Well, so do I! Do you think I like having to depend on you and Rosemary for every little thing? I was this close to turning my front wheel so we could clear the urn and make the plunge, but of course I didn’t. You don’t. You tell yourself, They have a new armature that you put on like an overall, and even quadriplegics walk! I saw it on TV.
Why, one day they’ll bring one of those gadgets to our house, and I’ll put it on like a coverall and for the first time since I took off on Dakie’s palomino, I will walk! Then I can say goodbye to Scooter and march away to a real life in the real world!
Soon, make it soon.
But I didn’t say any of that out loud, even though Little Elena and the boy had run off somewhere in her dinky car and my sisters were inside and wouldn’t hear. I said, “Or let’s us just rock a little bit, Scoot. It isn’t too hard, we’ll just keep rocking until this thing jolts free and we get it over with.” It would be easy, poor Scooter could die of its own weight.
I took a deep breath and thought, All right, get on with it, and I would have, but I heard the nicest voice. It came out of nowhere, like a sign from God. “Oh lady, wait! We don’t want to do that.”
And like an angel my friend was here, that sweet, sweet boy, same sandy hair as Randolph’s, I miss him so much! In fact he reminded me of our long-lost big brother. Ran escaped Mama’s greedy house when he was seventeen and that night the house, or something deep inside it, let out a great big sigh. That sigh is still backed up inside my hateful sisters, more like relief than grief: At least we’re done with him.
Randolph left a long time ago, and here was this sweet young man, only a little older than my beloved best brother the night he sat me down on the back porch and we hugged goodbye.
Lovely man, this new one, tall, easy-talking and gentle. He put us to rights before we could stop him, Scooter and me. He parked us in the safest place on the veranda, by the rail overlooking the porte cochère. He lined us up right next to the very last rocker, a lovely place to sit and talk, although nobody ever comes to talk to us. He parked us there with our brakes secured and left before I could say thank you, and what’s your name.
But he came back, we were so glad! I could swear he was gone less than a minute, and, good Lord, he put a nice cold Coca-Cola in my hands! Then he saw the way I was, I mean my hands, and he took my drink away from me long enough to put his finger into the ring and open it and take away the tab, he was the perfect gentleman, “Wouldn’t want to hurt your mouth on that,” and instead of throwing the tab into the urn along with the twins’ Coke tabs and cigarette butts, he folded it and slipped it into the watch pocket of his jeans and gave me the nicest smile. Then we heard Iris open the front doors with a crash and he went, “Shhh,” and slipped over the rail like a pirate leaving a treasure ship.
By the time Iris stomped across the porch to roll me back inside, by the time Rose came out to stare over the rail, my private Galahad wasn’t anywhere. If it hadn’t been for that Coke, which my sisters thought little Teddy had stolen behind their backs and given me to spite them, you wouldn’t know he’d ever been.
CHAPTER 6
Lane
God damn these skinny women poking their thin, Southern-lady noses into my luggage, my personal affairs, my everything, Rosemary inspecting my makeup bag, as in, “You look so tired, honey. Here, I’ll do that,” all because I can’t bring myself to unpack. I caught Iris sniffing my underwear as she rifled my suitcase— looking for drugs, the pill or a six-pack of condoms, whatever vices she could root out. “You haven’t even unpacked! Let’s put some of these things away.”
“Don’t!”
She gave me that swimmy, wounded look they all have, these old, old aunts. It hits like a sock full of sand, so what I have to say comes out: ooof. “I’m not staying long.”
“You know, this is Sister’s room; we don’t let just anybody sleep in Sister’s room, but Little Elena, you—”
“Stop that. It’s Lane!” To keep away the Big Bad. Yeah, there is one. I personally think it’s the house.
Iris took off the smile and went back to being herself. “Oh Elena, you’re just tired.”
“Elena was my mother.” It breaks my heart, just hearing her name. I loved her so much! “Goddammit, I’m Lane!”
Rosemary snapped, “Language!” As if I’m still fourteen. When I left for Chatham Hall I thought, Well, that’s that, but it never is. It never fucking is. Eight years of freedom— boarding school, in Gainesville at FSU— correction, two years of freedom in college before I met Barry, the charming, shitty, deceitful jerk, and fourteen years of what-you-might-call-freedom as that bastard’s deluded, as in, thinks this-is-forever wife; after fourteen years of deception and stealth financing to preserve that delusion, of impending misery warded off by the arrival of Theo, with his spiky hair and that wonderful grin; after all that, I don’t want my life back, I want MY LIFE.
Mine and Theo’s. I promised him we’d start over in some great place just as soon as I cashed in our bonds, but the aunts temporized for days. By Sunday, I’d had enough. We faced off in Sister’s bedroom— Sister was the youngest of the first generation born in this old house and she ended badly, Iris reminded me, to head off what was coming.
We were there for the big confrontation, but Rosemary didn’t know it. She was fooling with my suitcase. “Oh honey, let’s hang up these pretty things.”
I said, “Look, y’all are sweet, but don’t unpack me just yet. I’ll be out by the end of the week.” Translation, and Iris knew it: I’m only here until I march you down to the bank to countersign for me.
She thrust her jaw at me; the bitch was loaded for bear. “As if any girl who’s been off the job market for as long as you have can get a job in just five days.”
They went on fussing with my clothes to spite me, hanging this up, tsk-tsking over that, picking out items for Ivy to mend. “I’m not a girl!”
Rosemary stopped shuffling my lacy bras and went all there-there on me, “Don’t worry, sweetheart. It won’t matter how old you are, you’re still an Ellis girl, and that means something in this town. Our name opens the very best doors in Jacksonville.”
Iris started. “Be practical. Think of the money you’ll save, living here! Rose is a wonderful cook, and you won’t have to worry about rent or shopping or anything, there’s a 7-Eleven around here somewhere for eme
rgencies, and the Publix delivers anything you want! The playground’s gone, but we’ve put little Teddy’s name in at Jacksonville Country Day, and besides…”
“His name is Theo, Iris.”
Rosemary finished. “Papa founded a Teddy Ellis scholarship to protect his children and their children’s children, so that splendid private school won’t cost you a thing.”
“Oh, we’re not staying in Jacksonville.”
“Of course you are!”
“We’re going north as soon as we cash in my birthday bonds.”
“The bonds?” Rosemary blinked as though I’d said “fuck” in her presence. Or smacked her in the face with a dead fish.
So odd: I could swear I saw their tongues flick around their lips like lizards’ tongues in the seconds before Iris went all angry commandant. “If that’s what you’re counting on, don’t count on it!”
Rosemary wailed, “You’re leaving so soon?” In another minute she’d cry, and that’s never been a good thing.
Downstairs in the hall that night, when I went to kiss Ivy good night before coming up for the confrontation, my desperate Aunt Ivy pressed a bill into my hand and whispered into the dark, “Go, little bird. Fly.”
It was a ten.
Iris and I were at a standoff. I looked my tough, exacting aunt in the eye and repeated. “My bonds. Government bonds that my father put away when I was born. First National. Safe-deposit box.”
Blink blink blink.
“You know the ones. It’s my money, Iris. I need it now!”
Her face went through a bunch of changes, as though figures scrolled nonstop behind her eyes. After too long, she looked down that thin, sharp nose at me and said like a reproachful accountant, “Your little trust fund took care of the tuition, dear, but there were other expenses. Roofing. Your uniforms. We never complained, but we had to cash them in,” and I could swear I saw a flicker of triumph cross her face like a raptor trailing its scrap of torn flesh.