Roses

by Leila Meacham

  “I know, Amos,” she said, and with surprising nimbleness, she hooked the cane on her chair and came around the desk to him. Gently, she drew his head against her linen front. “This day had to come, you know… when we had to say good-bye. After all, I’m fifteen years your senior….”

  He pressed her hand, so thin and fragile-boned. When had it become an old woman’s hand? He remembered when it had been smooth and unblemished. “Do you know that I still remember the first time I saw you?” he said, keeping his eyes tightly closed. “It was in the DuMont Department Store. You came down the stairs in a royal blue dress, and your hair shone like black satin under the chandeliers.”

  He could feel her smile above his bald pate. “I remember. You were still in your army serge. By then you’d learned who William was and had come to check on the sort of people who would cause a boy like him to run away from home. I must say you did seem rather dazzled.”

  “I was bowled over.”

  She kissed the top of his head and released him. “I’ve always been grateful for our friendship, Amos. I want you to know that,” she said, returning to her chair. “I’m not one to emote, as you know, but the day you wandered into our little East Texas community was one of the more fortunate ones of my life.”

  Amos honked into his handkerchief. “Thank you, Mary. Now I must ask you, does Percy know about… your condition?”

  “Not yet. I’ll tell him and Sassie when I get back from Lubbock. I’ll make my funeral arrangements at that time as well. If I’d planned them earlier, news of my coming demise would be all over town by the time I left the parking lot. Hospice has been engaged to come a week after I return. Until then, I’d like my illness to remain our secret.” She slipped the strap of her handbag over her shoulder. “And now I must be going.”

  “No, no!” he protested, vaulting up from his chair. “It’s early yet.”

  “No, Amos, it’s late.” She reached behind her neck and unclasped the pearls. “These are for Rachel,” she said, laying the strand on his desk. “I’d like you to give them to her for me. You’ll know the proper time.”

  “Why not give them to her yourself when you see her?” he asked, his throat on fire. She seemed diminished without the pearls, her flesh old and exposed. Since Ollie’s death twelve years ago, she was rarely seen without them. She wore them everywhere, with everything.

  “She may not accept them after our talk, Amos, and then what would I do with them? They mustn’t be left to the discretion of the docents. You keep them until she’s ready. They are all she will have from me of the life she was expecting.”

  He bumped around the desk, his heart thudding. “Let me go with you to Lubbock,” he pleaded. “Let me be with you when you tell her.”

  “No, dear friend. Your presence there might make things awkward for the two of you afterward if things go wrong. Rachel must believe you’re impartial. She’ll need you. Whatever happens, either way, she’ll need you.”

  “I understand,” he said, his voice cracking. She held out her hand, and he understood that she wished them to express their farewells now. In the days to come, they might not be afforded this opportunity to say good-bye in private. He sandwiched her cool palm between his bony slabs, his eyes filling in spite of his determination to keep this moment on the dignified plane she’d lived all her life. “Good-bye, Mary,” he said.

  She took up her cane. “Good-bye, Amos. See after Rachel and Percy for me.”

  “You know I will.”

  She nodded, and he watched her tap her way to the door, back straining for the regal posture so typically Mary. Opening it, she did not look back but gave him a small wave over her shoulder as she stepped out and closed the door behind her.

  Chapter Two

  Amos stood in the silence, staring numbly into space, letting the tears trickle unchecked down his face. After a moment, he drew in a ragged breath, locked his office door, and returned to his desk, where he carefully wrapped the pearls in a clean handkerchief. They felt cool and fresh. Mary must have had them cleaned recently. There was no oil, no feel of her, to his touch. He would take them home at the end of the day and keep them for Rachel in a hand-carved letter box, the only memento of his mother’s he’d chosen to keep. He removed his tie, unbuttoned his collar, and went into an adjoining bathroom to wash his face. After toweling it dry, he administered eyedrops prescribed for ocular fatigue.

  Back at his desk, he punched an intercom button. “Susan, take the afternoon off. Hang out the closed sign and hook us up to the answering machine.”

  “Are you all right, Amos?”

  “I’m fine.”

  “Miss Mary—is she okay?”

  “She’s fine, too.” She didn’t believe him, of course, but he trusted his secretary of twenty years to say nothing of her suspicions that all was not fine with her employer and Miss Mary. “Go and enjoy your afternoon.”

  “Well… until tomorrow, then.”

  “Yes, until tomorrow.”

  Tomorrow. He felt sick at what that day would bring to Rachel, who right now was no doubt surveying cotton fields she thought would one day be hers. Tomorrow it would all be over—everything she’d given her adult life to. She was only twenty-nine and soon to be rich. She could start over—if she wasn’t too shattered to begin again—but it would be beyond Howbutker, beyond the future he’d envisioned for himself when Percy was gone, the last of the three friends who’d constituted the only family he’d ever known. He regarded Matt, Percy’s grandson, like a nephew, but when he married, his wife might have something to say about her family filling the void left by Ollie and Mary and Percy. Rachel, now, would have been another story. She adored him as he did her, and her house would have always been open to him. His old bachelor heart had so looked forward to her coming to live in Howbutker, residing in the Toliver mansion, keeping Mary’s spirit alive, marrying and raising kids for him to love and spoil in his declining years. Tomorrow all that would be over for him, too.

  He heaved a sigh and opened a door in the credenza. Never did he take a drink before six o’clock in the evening, and then his limit was two shots of Scotch mellowed with twice as much soda. Today he took a bottle from the cabinet, dumped the water from his glass, and unhesitatingly poured it half-full of Johnnie Walker Red.

  Glass in hand, he crossed to the French windows overlooking a small courtyard rife with the summer flowers of East Texas—pink primroses and blue plumbago, violet lantana and yellow nasturtium, all climbing the rock fence. The garden had been designed by Charles Waithe, son of the founder of the firm, to serve as a mental retreat from the heartsick duties of his office. Today the therapy didn’t work, but it evoked memories that Mary’s visit had already jogged to the surface. He remembered the day Charles, then a man of fifty, had turned from this window and asked if he’d be interested in a junior partner position. He’d been stunned, elated. The offer had come within the forty-eight hours he’d given William Toliver his train ticket, seen Mary on the stairs, and met her locally prominent husband and the equally powerful Percy Warwick. It had all happened so fast, his head still spun when he thought of how fate had been kind and parlayed his decision to part with his ticket into the fulfillment of his dreams—a job in his field, a place to call home, and friends to take him to their bosoms.

  It had all come about one early October morning in 1945. Just discharged from the army, with no job on the horizon and nowhere to hang his hat, he was on his way to Houston to see a sister he barely knew when the train stopped briefly outside a little burg with a sign over the station house that read: Welcome to Howbutker, Heart of the Piney Woods of Texas. He’d gotten off to stretch his legs when a teenage boy with green eyes and hair as black as a cornfield crow ran up to the conductor hollering, “Hold the train! Hold the train!”

  “Got a ticket, son?”

  “No, sir, I—”

  “Well, then, you’ll have to wait for the next train. This one’s full to capacity from here to Houston.”

&nb
sp; Amos had looked at the flushed face of the boy, his breath coming out in fast, chilled puffs, and recognized the desperation of a boy running away from home. He’s taking too much with him, he’d thought, recalling his own experience as a boy of fifteen on the lam from his parents. He hadn’t made it. That’s when he’d handed the boy his ticket. “Here. Take mine,” he’d said. “I’ll wait for the next train.”

  The boy—whom he later discovered to be the seventeen-year-old nephew of Mary Toliver DuMont—had rushed out on the platform to wave at him as the train bore him away, never to return to Howbutker to live. And Amos had never left. He’d hoisted his duffel and started into town with the idea of staying only one night, but the morning train had taken off without him. He’d often reflected on the irony of it… how William’s exit out of Howbutker had been his entrance in, and he’d never regretted a single day of it. Until now.

  He took a fiery swallow of the Scotch, feeling it go down like broken razor blades. Dammit, Mary, what in the world possessed you to do such a deplorable thing? He ran a hand over his bald scalp. What in God’s name had he missed that would explain—excuse—what she had done? He’d thought he knew her history and those of Ollie DuMont and Percy Warwick inside out. What he hadn’t read, he had heard from their own mouths. Naturally, he had arrived too late to witness the beginning of their stories, but he’d made a point to fill in the gaps. Nowhere had he come across anything—not a scrap of gossip, newspaper clipping, journal, not a word from people who had known them all their lives—that would explain why Mary had severed Rachel’s ties to her birthright and destroyed her lifelong dream.

  A sudden thought drove him to a bookshelf. He sought and found a volume that he took to his desk. Could the answer be here? He’d not read the history of the founding families of Howbutker since that October morning he’d helped William escape. Later in town, he’d learned that a search was on for the runaway, son of the late Miles Toliver, brother of Mary Toliver DuMont, who’d subsequently adopted the boy and given him everything. Bitterly recalling his own mistreatment when he’d been dragged back to his parents, he’d gone to the library seeking information about the rich DuMonts that would help him decide whether he should alert the authorities to the boy’s destination or keep his silence. There a librarian had handed him a copy of this book written by Jessica Toliver, Mary’s great-grandmother. Now that he was looking, a clue to Mary’s motives might pop out that he’d missed forty years ago. The title of the book was Roses.

  The narrative began with the immigration of Silas William Toliver and Jeremy Matthew Warwick to Texas in the fall of 1836. As the youngest sons of two of South Carolina’s most prominent plantation families, they stood little chance of becoming masters of their fathers’ estates and thus set out together to establish plantations of their own in a loam-rich area they’d been told existed in the eastern part of the new republic of Texas. Both were blue-blooded descendants of English royalty, though they sprang from warring houses—the Lancasters and the Yorks. In the middle of the 1600s, descendants of their families, who had been enemies during the War of the Roses, found themselves settling cheek by jowl on plantations in the New World near the future site of Charleston, which they helped to establish in 1670. Out of mutual dependence, the two families had buried their ancestral differences, retaining only the emblems by which their allegiance to their respective houses in England were known—their roses. The Warwicks, descended from the House of York, grew only white roses in their gardens, while the Tolivers cultivated exclusively red roses, the symbol of the House of Lancaster.

  By 1830, cotton was king in the South, and the two youngest sons yearned for plantations of their own in a place where they might establish a town that reflected the noblest ideals of their English and southern culture. Joining their wagon train were families of lesser breeding and education who nonetheless shared the same dreams, and regard for hard work, God, and their southern heritage. Included also were the slaves—men, women, and children—upon whose backs these dreams were to be made possible. They started west, taking the southern route along the trails that had lured men like Davy Crockett and Jim Bowie. Near New Orleans, a Frenchman, tall and slim in the saddle, rode out to meet them. He introduced himself as Henri DuMont and asked if he could join the train. He was dressed in a suit of the finest cut and cloth and exuded charm and sophistication. He, too, was an aristocrat, a descendant of King Louis VI, whose family had immigrated to Louisiana to escape the horrors of the French Revolution. Owing to a falling-out with his father over how to run their exclusive mercantile store in New Orleans, it was now his intention to establish his own emporium in Texas, without paternal interference. Silas and Jeremy welcomed him.

  Had they continued a bit farther west toward a town now called Corsicana, so Jessica Toliver informed the reader, they would have reached the land they were seeking, an area rich in a soil known as “black waxy” that was to yield huge crops of corn and cotton to future landowners. As it was, horses and travelers were tired by the time the wagon train crossed the Sabine River from Louisiana into Texas, and a weary Silas William Toliver surveyed the pine-covered hillsides and drawled, “How about here?”

  The question was passed and repeated among the settlers, though with less refined tongues, and by the end of the line it had become: “How ’bout cher?” Thus it was that the town came to be called after the question to which the colonizers unanimously answered yes. The founding fathers gave in to the consensus that the town be so named only on the condition that the ch be hardened to a k and spelled and pronounced as “How-but-ker.”

  Despite its rather yokelish name, the first inhabitants were determined to set a cultured tone for the community not unlike the gracious way of life they’d known, or wanted to know. They were in accord that here among the pine trees, life would be lived in the traditional southern fashion. As it turned out, few became plantation owners. There were too many trees to clear from the land, and the hillsides were difficult to work. There were other vocations to which a man could turn his hands if he was able and willing. Some settled for smaller farms, others chose cattle raising, a few went into dairy farming. A number opened businesses built to the exact specifications laid out by the city planning commission and agreed upon by the voting citizens of the young community. Jeremy Warwick saw his financial future assured in the cutting and selling of timber. His eye was on the markets to be found in Dallas and Galveston and other cities springing up in the new republic.

  Henri DuMont opened a dry-goods store in the center of town that in time surpassed the elegance of his father’s in New Orleans. In addition, he bought and developed property for commercial purposes, renting his buildings to shopkeepers lured to Howbutker by its reputation for civic-mindedness, law and order, and the sobriety of its citizens. But Silas William Toliver had not been willing to turn his hands to another occupation. Convinced that man’s only vocation was land, he set about with his slaves to cultivate and plant his acres in cotton, using his profits to expand his holdings. Within a few years, he owned the largest tract of land along the Sabine River, which afforded easy transport of his cotton by raft to the Gulf of Mexico.

  He permitted only one alteration to the life he had envisioned when he left South Carolina. Rather than constructing the plantation manor on the land he cleared, he built it in town as a concession to his wife. She preferred to reside among her friends dwelling in other mansions of southern inspiration on a street named Houston Avenue. Along this street, known locally as Founders Row, lived the DuMonts and Warwicks.

  Silas called his plantation Somerset, after the English duke from whom he was descended.

  Not surprisingly, at the first meeting to discuss the creation of the town, its layout and design, the reins of leadership were voted over to Silas and Jeremy and Henri. As a student of world history, Henri was familiar with the War of the Roses in England and the part his colleagues’ families had played in the thirty-two-year conflict. He had noted the root-wrapped rosebushes
each family had labored to bring from South Carolina and understood their significance. After the meeting, he made a private suggestion to the two family heads. Why not grow both colors of roses in their gardens, plant the white and red to mingle equally as a show of unity?

  An uncomfortable silence met this proposal. Henri placed a hand on the shoulder of each man and said quietly, “There are bound to be differences between you. You have brought them with you in the guise of your roses.”

  “They are the symbols of our lineage, of who we are,” protested Silas Toliver.

  “That is so,” agreed Henri. “They are symbols of what you are individually, but they must also represent what you are collectively. You are men of responsibility. Responsible men reason out their differences. They do not make war to solve them. As long as your gardens boast only the symbol of your own house to the exclusion of the other, there will be the suggestion of war—at best, estrangement—as an alternate course, the course your forebears chose in England.”

  “What about you?” one of them asked. “You are with us in this enterprise. What will you grow in your garden?”

  “Why…” The Frenchman spread his hands in the manner of his countrymen. “The red and white rose, what else? They will be a reminder of my duty to our friendship, to our joint endeavors. And if ever I should offend you, I will send a red rose to ask forgiveness. And if ever I receive one tendered for that purpose, I will return a white rose to say that all is forgiven.”

  The two men mused over the suggestion. “We are men of great pride,” Jeremy Warwick finally conceded. “It is difficult for men like us to admit our mistakes to those we offend.”

  “And as hard to give voice to forgiveness,” offered Silas Toliver. “Having in our gardens the pick of both roses would allow us to ask for and grant pardon without words.” He reflected a moment. “What if… pardon is not granted? What then? Do we grow pink roses as well?”