Sweet Mercy

by Ann Tatlock

  “Hmm.”

  “It’s nice to see the girls having such fun with Daddy and Warren, isn’t it?”

  We watched the foursome play in the water. Warren’s shoulders had turned pink in the sun, but he didn’t seem to notice. Daddy was much more at ease today, now that our leaving was settled. He’d come down to breakfast whistling.

  “Do you think you’ll have more?” I asked.

  “More kids? No. Two’s enough.”

  “Oh. Well, then . . .”

  “What?”

  “When Gracie was born, didn’t Warren hope for a son?”

  Cassandra thought a moment, shook her head. “He never said so. He’s a wonderful daddy to the girls, both of them.”

  Even Effie, I thought, who wasn’t his own.

  “Daddy wished I was a boy,” I said.

  She looked at me sharply. “Why on earth would you say that?”

  “Well, you know.” I paused and shrugged. “To make up for the one who died between us.”

  “That’s not true, Eve. I can’t imagine how you ever got that idea.”

  “It only makes sense.”

  “It doesn’t make sense at all. When you were born, Mother and Daddy were thrilled. Nothing was ever said about wanting a son instead. They were just thankful you were healthy and strong.”

  I had to let that sink in. “Really?” I asked.

  “Of course, silly. I should know. I was there, after all.”

  Cassandra reached for her glass of lemonade and took a long drink. She looked thoughtful—and older and more serious than the sister I had left in St. Paul. “You know, Eve,” she said at length, “Gracie is the spitting image of you at age three.”

  I studied my niece, smiled at her cherubic little-girl face, her head of blond ringlets. “Really?” I asked again.

  Cassandra nodded. “It’s uncanny, actually. I look at her and sometimes I think I’m looking at you. I even call her Eve sometimes.”

  “You do? Well, I don’t know. I can’t see it myself.”

  “You just don’t know what you looked like at three, except for a picture or two.”

  “I guess not.”

  “But when you were three, I was eleven. Old enough to be aware. Old enough to know better. Sometimes I look at Gracie and I see you, and I feel such terrible shame.”

  I cocked my head and my mouth fell open. “But why?”

  Cassandra delayed answering by picking up the glass of lemonade and taking long leisurely sips. At last she said, “You’re angry with me, aren’t you?”

  I drew in a breath. I felt my eyes narrow. “Of course not,” I said.

  “Tell the truth, Eve. You’re angry, and frankly, I don’t blame you. I treated you something awful when we were kids.”

  “Well—”

  “It’s just . . .”

  “Not always, though. I remember some good times.”

  “How could you possibly?”

  “Well . . .” I paused to think. “I remember being here, on the island . . . we had fun together. You danced with me when a band came and played in the pavilion. I was very small but I have a vague memory of you twirling me around.”

  “Oh.” She leaned back in the chair and sighed deeply. “I suppose I tried, early on. But it was no use.”

  “What do you mean, it was no use?”

  She shook her head. “I didn’t know how to handle . . . well, see, I was eight years old when you were born, and I was used to being the only child. When you came along, I was so jealous. It was as though I became invisible to Mother and Daddy. Everything was Eve, Eve, Eve. I guess, after they’d lost the other baby . . . and I remember that, you know. I remember how heart-wrenching and miserable that was. All the tears! They tried to hide their grief from me, but . . .” She shook her head again and lifted her hands to her ears. “I thought the crying would never stop. And then, after all that, there you were. A beautiful, healthy baby. And Mother and Daddy were happy again. And I was forgotten.”

  I sat up straight in the chair and looked hard at my sister. “That’s not true, Cassandra. They always loved you.”

  She drew back one corner of her mouth before looking away. “I know that now. I didn’t know it then. So I took my anger out on you, because I considered it your fault. If you hadn’t been there, I would have gone on being an only child. And that would have made me special.”

  “But . . .” Incredulous, I was having trouble gathering my thoughts. My sister, my tormentor, had always seemed to me genuinely happy and self-satisfied. And beautiful. And popular. “Cassandra,” I said quietly. When she turned her eyes to me, I saw they were glassy with tears. I understood then what I had never understood before. “You say you were jealous of me, but I spent my whole childhood jealous of you.”

  “Of me?”

  I nodded.

  “Why?”

  “Because you were so beautiful. You had so many friends and boyfriends. I pretended to be disgusted by you, but I wanted to be just like you, and I knew I never would be. You were the swan and I was the ugly duckling.”

  We looked at each other. I saw the corners of her mouth twitch, and in the next moment we were laughing loudly together.

  “Holy buckets,” she cried. “You mean we spent all those years being jealous of each other?”

  I threw up my hands. “I guess so!”

  We went on laughing loud and long, until Cassandra started fanning herself again with the Ladies’ Home Journal. She handed me True Detective so I could cool my own laughter. And my surprise and regret at all the hurtful years.

  After several minutes, she sighed and shook her head. “You know, Eve,” she said, “we never knew the boy, but I think he affected our lives more than we can imagine.”

  I nodded in agreement. “I always felt like I had to make up for his death somehow. You know, do something special to kind of make everything okay for Mother and Daddy.”

  “Yes.” Another deep sigh. “And I always felt there wasn’t anything at all I could do to make everything okay for Mother and Daddy, because I simply wasn’t there anymore.”

  After a moment’s silence, I said, “Maybe when we get back to St. Paul, we can kind of start over. You know, be friends this time around.”

  She smiled at me and nodded. “I’d like that.”

  “I wonder whether we might have been friends all along, if the boy had lived?”

  “Who’s to say?” Cassandra lifted her shoulders in a shrug. “Maybe a lot of things would have been different if he’d lived.”

  “You know, I’ve never known anything about him. I’m not sure I would have known he’d been born, if you hadn’t told me.”

  “You mean, you never heard Mother and Daddy mention him?”

  “Never. And I never asked. Did he have a name?”

  “Oh yes. They named him after Daddy. Andrew Lyle Marryat Jr. He was born perfectly formed, a perfect little corpse. He never so much as took his first breath.”

  A large cumulus cloud covered the sun and cast us into shadow. A couple in a rowboat drifted lazily on the river, he pulling leisurely at the oars, she sitting at ease under a white parasol. I envied them, yet at the same time I wondered whether they were happy or whether there was some gnawing sadness beneath the surface of things.

  Daddy lifted Grace to his shoulders and started walking toward shore.

  “Cassandra?”

  “Yeah?”

  “There’s a whole world of hurt out there, isn’t there?”

  My sister nodded slowly. “And then some,” she said.

  Daddy came and settled Grace in her mother’s lap. Cassandra put her arms around the little girl and held her close.

  Chapter 33

  Cassandra took the girls back to the lodge for their afternoon nap while Daddy and Warren traipsed off to the Eatery for a snack and something to drink. Daddy invited me to go but I wanted to be alone.

  Once everybody left I realized I was still clutching Cassandra’s True Detective magazine. Thu
mbing through it, I settled on an article about the smuggling of rum from Jamaica. Fifteen minutes later, my jaw came unhinged and my wide eyes gazed unseeing out over the river.

  Tossing the magazine aside, I headed for the lodge in search of Jones.

  I stopped by my room first to change out of my bathing suit and into my usual cotton dress. I didn’t want to confront Jones without being properly attired.

  He was in the apartment, not at the radio table but at the desk on the opposite wall. The windows were thrown wide open against the heat. Two oscillating fans blew air at each other from opposite ends of the room, rustling several piles of paper on the desk that would have gone sailing had they not been held down by paperweights. Jones was bent over an open checkbook; I could hear the tip of his pen scratching its way across the paper.

  “Jones?”

  He looked up, magnified eyes blinking. “Oh. Hello, Eve.”

  “You busy?”

  “Just working my way through a pile of invoices. Trying to get caught up before Cyrus gets home tonight.”

  “He’ll be here tonight for sure?”

  “According to his latest telegram, yes.”

  I shivered as I thought about Uncle Cy traveling home with Aunt Cora’s body. I couldn’t begin to imagine what Jones must be feeling.

  “Um, Jones?”

  He grunted. He tore off a finished check and slid it into an envelope.

  “Can I ask you something?”

  He licked the envelope and sealed it. “I guess so.”

  “You don’t have to tell me, but I was just wondering.”

  My pulse escalated and I could feel my heart pounding in my chest. I took a deep breath to calm myself.

  Jones looked annoyed. “Well, I can’t tell you anything if you don’t ask your question,” he said.

  “Um.” I took a few steps closer. He didn’t invite me to sit down. I would have declined anyway. His pen was scratching out another check. “It’s about the radios,” I said.

  He nodded. He picked up another bill and studied it. The pen moved in rapid strokes as he scribbled something on the invoice.

  I took another tentative step toward the desk. “You were receiving information. I mean, from Cincinnati. Weren’t you?”

  The scratching stopped. The pen slowly dropped to the desk. Jones turned to face me. “What do you mean, Eve?”

  With another deep breath, I admonished myself not to back down now. “Those bedtime stories you listened to. They were coded messages, weren’t they, telling you when you could expect the next shipment of liquor to come in on the train.”

  The red eyes narrowed behind the lenses. “Why do you think that?”

  I swallowed. I felt the spittle slide down my throat, leaving my mouth dry. “I read about that kind of thing in a magazine just now.” My voice had weakened but I compensated by lifting my head higher.

  “You did, huh?”

  I nodded.

  “What magazine was that?”

  Because I didn’t want to admit to the name, it came out in a whisper. “True Detective.”

  He laughed. One swift cutting laugh. “And you believe what you read in a rag like that?” He took his glasses off and rubbed his eyes. “Anyway,” he added, “what difference does it make?”

  “It doesn’t make any difference. Not really. I just want to know.”

  “Uh-huh.” He slid his glasses back on and pulled another statement from the pile.

  A bead of sweat slunk down my back. “If you don’t tell me otherwise, Jones, I’m going to believe you were helping Uncle Cy with the bootlegging, that you didn’t just know about it but you were telling Uncle Cy when the liquor was coming in on the train.”

  Blood rose to his pale cheeks, turning his skin eerily red. When he spoke he didn’t look at me. “It doesn’t matter what you think, does it, Eve? Another few days and we’ll never see each other again.”

  “I know that, Jones, so I just want to know why. Uncle Cy never treated you like a son. He never even treated you like a real member of the family. Why did you help him?”

  “I didn’t help him!” Jones yelled. I gasped as he banged the desk with an open palm, pushed back the chair, and stood abruptly. He walked to the window and looked out. The view was of the gas station, where even now the illegal liquor sat in its hiding place, awaiting customers.

  “Then why did you do it, Jones?” I asked quietly.

  He leaned his head back and took a deep breath. “I did it for her. For my mother.”

  I didn’t respond. I waited. After a moment, he turned from the window and looked at me. “I did it for my mother,” he said again, “because we needed the money to try to save her.”

  And now she was dead, her body riding in a casket halfway across the country, heading home for burial. “I’m sorry,” I said. “I’m not judging you, Jones. I understand why you’d do it. I really do.”

  He feigned a smile. “Thank you, but I doubt it. You can’t possibly understand. My mother loved me. She was the only person who ever did. She and my father. Now they’re both dead.”

  I felt something terrible in my chest, an actual constriction of my heart because I knew what Jones said was true. To everyone other than his own parents he was the red-eyed devil, the freak, the boy to be hushed up and hidden away.

  I fumbled for something to say. I made several false starts, but Jones cut me off by asking, “When are you leaving?”

  “You mean, to go back to Minnesota?”

  He nodded.

  “Saturday.”

  “Good.” He walked back to the desk and sat down. “You know, you can tell the police about my involvement, but it won’t matter. Not anymore.”

  “I have no intention of telling anyone anything. You know that. That’s why we’re leaving. So Daddy and I don’t have to live a lie.”

  He looked at the wall and I looked at his profile. His head bobbed slightly; he appeared deep in thought. Finally he said, “Go on home and forget you ever came here. Just forget about this place, Eve. That’s the best thing you can do.”

  A silence settled between us, weighted with sadness. As I had so many times before, as I had when his mother died, I wanted to throw my arms around Jones and comfort him.

  Hesitantly I said, “I mean it when I say there’s one good thing I’ll never forget about this place, and that’s you, Jones.”

  Slowly he turned his gaze to me. We looked at each other for what seemed a very long time. His face relaxed, and though his eyes were sorrowful, one corner of his mouth turned up in the smallest of smiles. “You take care of yourself, Cousin Eve.”

  I breathed deeply and nodded. “You too, Jones O’Brannigan.”

  I moved to the desk and put my hand over his. He looked at it, then circled his fingers around my own and squeezed gently. He hung his head, as though against some inner pain. For a moment I thought he might kiss my knuckles or press my fingers to his cheek. But he didn’t. He pulled his hand from my clasp and picked up his pen. I dropped my hand to my side and left the room.

  Chapter 34

  His mother’s funeral called for one of Jones’s rare excursions from the lodge. On the morning of the service, he slipped into a gray linen suit, slicked his white hair down with Murray’s pomade, and ventured forth to endure the stares of those who had come to pay his mother their last respects.

  At his request I sat beside him in the church, lost in the tangle of candles, holy water, incense, and a volley of Latin that left my head reeling. Jones appeared unmoved; the only indication that he was aware of anything at all was a nervous twitching of his right thumb.

  I heaved a sigh of relief when the choir started singing something about paradise and the casket was carried out of the church. There was still the burial to get through, but at least we were making progress. At the grave site, I stood beside a still stony-faced Jones. I longed to comfort him, but his rigid husk seemed impenetrable. The few tears that sprang to my eyes weren’t for the aunt I’d never known bu
t for her hapless son and the open-ended question of what would become of him. The world was not a kind place for someone like Jones.

  I tried to pay attention as the priest intoned a few prayers and sang words of Scripture. The coffin was lowered into the earth and sprinkled with holy water while we silently recited The Lord’s Prayer. Finally the priest uttered the parting words in English, something I could at last understand: “May her soul and the souls of all the faithful departed through the mercy of God rest in peace.”

  Jones rode home from the cemetery with Uncle Cy and promptly disappeared. He completely sidestepped the food-laden reception in the dining room that the ladies of Mercy had spent days preparing. It was not his way to mingle, nor, I realized, would the townsfolk have wanted him to. Awkward enough to be at a funeral without having to express one’s sympathy to a boy they had never once spoken to before. On top of that, they would not have been able to look him in the eye without flinching.

  No sympathy was wasted, though, as the citizens of Mercy heaped it in great piles upon Uncle Cy. Though he was genuinely grieving, my uncle’s hangdog look annoyed me. I didn’t think he deserved the comfort and condolences of the crowd that had gathered at the lodge. For one swift moment, as I was reaching for a glass of fruit punch, I felt the urge to stand in the center of the room and holler, “Cyrus Marryat is a bootlegger! His stash of liquor is in the cellar right beneath this room!” I nearly laughed out loud just imagining the wave of horror that would follow my announcement, knocking the expressions of grief right off this throng of sweaty faces, replacing it with wide-eyed shock and contempt. What an instant change in atmosphere, if only these people knew the truth.

  But of course I held my tongue. I chose a glass of punch, looked around the room, listened to snippets of stilted conversation, and moved in a haze of heat and fatigue from one end of the dining room to the other. As I passed by a second punch bowl at the back of the room, I witnessed a scene that brought me up short. Two tidy, well-dressed men were chatting amiably when one reached into his jacket’s inner pocket, pulled out a thin silver flask, poured a dollop into his glass of punch and another into the glass of his companion. That done, the flask was then returned to the unseen pocket in one swift and uninterrupted motion while seemingly no one noticed or, if they did, no one cared. It was just as though the two men had lighted cigarettes or bitten into wedges of tomato sandwiches rather than indulging in something illegal.