Roses

by Leila Meacham

  “Because why, Lucy?”

  “Because you’re a—you’re a—”

  “I’m a…?” Percy prompted.

  “You’re a—a homosexual!”

  For a few seconds, Percy stared at his wife in frozen astonishment, then he let out a guffaw of astounded laughter. “Oh, Lucy, is that what you believe?”

  She set her hands on her hips. “Well, aren’t you?”

  “No.”

  “Have you ever done it before?”

  “Yes,” he answered, still in the throes of amusement.

  “How many times?”

  He did not wish to cause her pain, but he’d be damned if he’d allow her to believe a misconception that she’d use as a weapon to keep his child from him. “Often enough to assure you that you need have no worry that I may be an undue influence on our son.”

  “I don’t believe you. It’s the only explanation that makes sense.” Slowly, arching her neck to observe him from beneath her lashes, she parted her robe, revealing her naked body. A slight protuberance of her abdomen disclosed the child to come. She cupped her swollen breasts in her hands. “How can you refuse these? Every man who’s ever looked at me has wanted to get his hands around them.” She moved toward him, holding out her bountiful endowments. “Aren’t these lovely, Percy? Aren’t they the most delicious-looking things? Why don’t you want me?”

  “Lucy, stop it,” Percy ordered softy, drawing the robe closed. He did want her. He found her pregnant state erotically alluring, and he’d have liked nothing better than to pick her up and take her to his bed, there to ease into her and give them both the relief they craved. But nothing had changed to suggest their lovemaking would be more satisfying, and it would complicate their situation even more.

  She sensed his withdrawal, and her small round face tightened in fury and frustration. She clutched the robe to her tightly. “You bastard! I’ll never let you near my son. He’ll be all mine, Percy. I’ll see to that. No homo is going to have a hand in raising my boy! Homo, homo, homo,” she jeered as he left the room, closing the door quietly behind him, shutting out the sound of her pain.

  Chapter Thirty-seven

  The old year ended, and 1922 brought about improvements and acquisitions for the various enterprises of Howbutker’s triumvirate. In Mary’s absence, Hoagy Carter had managed Somerset with surprising success and brought in a crop that enabled her not only to pay off her loan at the Howbutker State Bank, but to fund an improved irrigation system for the plantation. The Warwicks acquired several lumber-related subsidiaries that resulted in renaming the company Warwick Industries, and Ollie DuMont opened a second department store in Houston.

  As the year edged toward spring, Lucy’s figure broadened to cumbersome proportions. She waddled when she walked, and her baby-soft skin gleamed with a constant sheen of perspiration owing to the unprecedented heat. Housebound because of her bulk and discomfort, she seemed to draw closer to Beatrice as she entered the final weeks of her pregnancy. Several times, Percy had come across the two women sitting together sewing baby clothes and talking quietly like old friends.

  “It’s so sad to see her when you come into the room,” Beatrice said to her son. “She’s like a snarling puppy wagging its tail.”

  “I know, Mother.”

  After the party celebrating the DuMonts’ return, Percy fell into the habit of visiting them at the end of his workday at least twice a week. There had never been any question but that the couple would reside in the Toliver mansion, leaving Abel to ramble around in the château-style family home at the end of the avenue. At first, Percy had expected a certain awkwardness when he called upon the couple the Monday after the party, but he was lonely for their company and drawn to the baby, whose image hardly left his mind. He might have known Ollie would put him at ease.

  “Percy, my boy!” his friend had cried when Percy telephoned him at the store. “My hand was on the crank to give you a ring when the secretary said you were on the line. I wanted to ask you to come by the house and crack open a bottle of something with me when you leave the office today. Mary may not be able to join us. You know how she is during planting season.”

  “Indeed I do,” Percy said quietly.

  But Mary was home, sipping lemonade and saying little as she rocked the baby and listened to the men who, within minutes, were carrying on like old times. Percy perceived that Mary’s reticence was due to her uncertainty of where she and Ollie now stood with him. He told himself that it would take time for her to be assured that he came only out of friendship. He must not allow her marriage to rob him of the two people essential to his only happiness. And now there was Matthew, too.

  Lucy was never present at these gatherings. She was not invited, and as far as Percy could determine, she had no knowledge of his visits. The two women had not attempted to see each other after the party, and he decided not to interfere with the status quo. His wife’s absence permitted him greater freedom to enjoy himself, relax, and make a fuss over the child, who now recognized him and pumped his little arms and legs in gurgling welcome when he came into sight.

  Before long, Mary appeared more relaxed and returned near enough to her old self for them to laugh together and pretend for the sake of all they had to preserve that their love had never been. By mutual, unspoken consent, they avoided physical and eye contact, Ollie and Matthew becoming the screens through which each saw the other dimly.

  Sometimes Percy would arrive to find Mary still out at the plantation, her absence predictable but nettling. She should be home with her husband and son that late in the day, he opined privately, but he and Ollie had his godson to themselves then. Ollie would already have carried the little fellow to the screened back porch to catch the breeze, and he and Percy would talk and drink while one or the other’s foot rocked the crib.

  “Been down to the DuMonts again, have you?” Lucy asked one evening. She was in their sitting room, hem stitching the latest blue garment for the baby.

  He made a wry face that he should be surprised at her knowledge of his visits, since by now he knew that little escaped his wife. “You could have come, too, you know.”

  Lucy chewed viciously at a length of thread with her small, sharp teeth. Percy took pity on her and handed her a pair of scissors lying beyond her reach. She took them without thanking him, snipped the thread, and said, “To watch you making ga-ga eyes at Matthew?”

  Percy sighed. “Isn’t it enough that you’re jealous of Mary? Must you be jealous of her son, too?”

  Lucy’s hands came to rest on her mammoth abdomen. She glanced up at him with a softer look. He’d been standing all along. He never stayed long enough in his wife’s presence to take a seat. “So all right, I’m jealous. I’m jealous of anything she possesses that should be mine.”

  He felt as if a sudden breeze had fluttered down his spine. He drew his brows together. “What do you mean by that?” he demanded, more sharply than he intended.

  “You know full well what I mean. She… has your friendship, and now her son does, too.”

  Releasing his held breath, Percy reached to take her hand. “I want to be friends with you, Lucy, but you refuse to let me.”

  She gazed, mesmerized, at the unexpected contact of his hand. “Well, I’ll… try to be friends—for the sake of the baby and since I can’t have anything else from you.” She lifted her blue eyes, naked with need, to his face. “And I didn’t mean it when I said I’d keep the baby from you. I… want him to know his father.”

  “I know you didn’t mean it,” he said, releasing her hand. “I know you don’t mean a lot of what you say to me.”

  Several weeks before the baby was due, Ollie asked Percy if he would drive him to Dallas to be fitted for an artificial leg, the first of its kind that he was willing to try. “I’d go by train,” he said, “but the damn things are so uncomfortable and unreliable. I hate to ask Mary now that she’s smack dab in the middle of ginning. She’d drop everything in a minute, of course, but there�
�s no need for that, and besides”—Ollie indicated his pinned pants leg—“under the circumstances, Percy, I believe I’d prefer your company.”

  Resentment against Mary curdled within him as sour as bad milk. He agreed that in Ollie’s situation, his assistance would probably be more suitable than Mary’s, but it galled him that Ollie felt he could not impose upon his wife’s duties to the plantation. Mary and her goddamn cotton. “How about Matthew?” he asked. “Will he be all right while we’re gone?”

  “Oh, of course. Sassie loves that boy like her own.”

  Percy broached Ollie’s request with Lucy. Since the evening of their last parley, they’d been getting along somewhat. He knew she was frightened by the ordeal of childbirth, and he was frightened for her. Since she did not like to read, he’d withdrawn books on childbirth from the library and read them aloud to her in the evenings in their sitting room. She’d listen intently and discuss their contents with him afterward without animosity.

  It was a tenuous truce at best, and it was with a feeling of guilt that Percy asked if she minded his leaving her at such a time. But, as usual, she surprised him.

  “I think you should take him, Percy. You know the reason Ollie doesn’t want to go by train, don’t you?”

  He confessed that he did not.

  “Well, because… How long were you fellows on the train from New Jersey?”

  “About six days.”

  “Can you imagine how Ollie must have felt, what he must have thought, during those days and nights coming home to Howbutker without a leg? No wonder he doesn’t like trains. Yes, you should drive him. I’ll be fine. Your mother and father will take care of me, but we’ll wait for you in any case.” She smiled at him, reminding him of the old Lucy. Much of her behavior lately reminded him of the girl she was before their marriage. The change was not—as his mother would say—“put on,” but seemed due to a genuine desire to become his friend.

  “Thank you, Lucy,” he said, returning her smile. “I’ll be back as soon as I can.”

  Percy drove them in Abel’s roomy new six-cylinder Packard sedan, but the trip was long and hot to the Veterans Administration Hospital in Dallas. Ollie was flush-faced from heat and exhaustion by the time they reached its entrance. Perspiration stood on his forehead and dampened his shirt collar, and Percy ached for his discomfort as his friend labored to heave himself out of the sedan. An orderly appeared with a wheelchair, but Ollie waved it away and settled his crutches under his powerfully developed arms. “Let’s go get ’em, Percy, my boy,” he said, and swung after the orderly pushing the empty wheelchair.

  After an interminable delay in filling out admittance forms, an attendant arrived with Ollie’s medical records under his arm to escort him to an examining room. It was at the end of a long hall, and Ollie looked visibly dismayed at the distance. “Steady, old man,” Percy said, following close beside him. “Only a few yards more.”

  But short of their destination, Ollie gasped, “Percy, I can feel my leg again, and the pain. I think I will take that wheelchair.”

  But it was too late. His one leg buckled, and he toppled forward, his face contorted in pain. Crutches and the steel medical file clattered to the floor as the attendant and Percy tried to break his fall. The attendant ran for a stretcher while Percy loosened Ollie’s tie and the top buttons of his shirt, his hands trembling, seeing again the body of his friend lying helpless and soaked with blood alongside a shell-shattered road. “Now, get that look off your face,” Ollie ordered with a determined smile. “Sometimes this happens, and I’m all quivering flesh and raw nerve ends, but it passes. Just make sure you have a stiff Scotch ready for me when I get out of here.”

  “If I have to distill it myself,” Percy said.

  The stretcher arrived, and the two attendants lifted Ollie onto it. “If you’ll pick up his file, sir, and bring it along, we’d be grateful,” one of them said as he hoisted the framework of poles. Percy picked up the crutches and medical file, his hands still shaking. He took a minute to catch his breath and steady his own nerves before following the white-coats down the hall, but by the time he’d reached the anteroom of the examining area, they’d whisked the stretcher behind the No Admittance doors.

  He decided that while he waited for somebody to return for the file, he’d take a look to learn the extent of Ollie’s condition. Until today, he had not known that he could still feel pain in his missing leg. He never complained to him, but Percy was well aware of the reason. Like the wise man he was, the incomparable friend, Ollie knew that nothing drives a thorn deeper or quicker into the side of friendship than guilt.

  The initial army report came first, the entries written in the hurried scrawl of a frontline doctor, the kind he’d read dozens of times on the clipboards hanging from the cots of men he’d visited in tent hospitals. In medical jargon, it described Ollie’s injury and amputation, and then, at the conclusion of the report, a line—added like an afterthought—stilled the flow of his blood. He read it once, batted his eyes to make sure of his vision, then read it again: “As a result of Captain DuMont’s injuries, the urethra is susceptible to infection resulting from retention of wastes normally excreted in the urine, and the irreparable damage to the penis renders the organ incapable of functioning for the purpose of intercourse and procreation.”

  The metal-covered file fell to the floor with a loud bang. Percy did not hear it. He flung himself out of his chair and staggered to an open widow, struggling for breath. His stomach heaved, his head reeled. He pressed his forehead to the cool white enamel of the window frame to stop the spinning of the room. Oh, my God… oh, my God…

  “You all right, sir?”

  It was the orderly, come to retrieve the file. From his position at the window, Percy mumbled, “I’m fine. Go tend to Captain DuMont.”

  He fell into a chair next to the open window and pressed his palms to the sides of his head. Matthew… that sweet little boy… his—his! The obvious sequence of events unrolled in his bursting brain like the erratic reel of a silent film. Mary discovered she was pregnant after he ran off to Canada. She waited, but he did not come home. Finally, she went to the only man who could rescue her and her child. “Ollie was here,” his mother had said. And so Ollie had married her and agreed to raise her son as his own… shattered Ollie, who could give her no more children… who could not…

  He dropped his head into his hands and moaned—deep, bellowing tolls of grief dredged from the bowels of deepest despair. The orderly returned thirty minutes later to find him sprawled in the chair beneath the open window, staring blank-eyed like a dead man, his face ashen and glossed with tears. “Uh, pardon me, sir,” he said, fidgeting with obvious embarrassment, “but I’ve come out to tell you that Captain DuMont will be hospitalized for observation and treatment until he can be fitted with a prosthetic limb. That’ll take about a week. He’s been given a sedative and is fast asleep. You can see him in Ward B during visiting hours from six to eight o’clock this evening.”

  Percy was spared the awkwardness of the visit when he telephoned home from the hospital and Beatrice asked that he return immediately. He was now the father of a strapping ten-pound son.

  Chapter Thirty-eight

  HOWBUTKER, 1933

  Excuse me, Mr. Warwick, but there’s a Miss Thompson here to see you.”

  Percy did not glance up from the report he was reading. It was late October, four years after the financial crash on Wall Street, which had sent the nation spinning into the Great Depression. Every day brought job seekers into his secretary’s office pleading for work at Warwick Industries, one of the few stable ships in the county still sailing calmly in the worsening economic waters. “Did you tell her it’s a waste of time to see me, Sally? The payroll is splitting at the seams as it is.”

  “Oh, she isn’t here seeking employment, Mr. Warwick. Miss Thompson is a teacher. She’s here about your son.”

  Percy turned up a blank stare, his mind working with the phrase your son. />
  “Wyatt, sir,” Sally said.

  “Oh, yes, of course. Send her in, Sally.”

  He rose to greet her, as was his custom when visitors were shown into his office. It did not matter who they were or the purpose of their call. Percy Warwick was noted for the dignity he accorded everyone, even those who, as was often the case these days, came begging, hat in hand, for a job, a loan, more time to pay off debts.

  Miss Thompson had not come begging, that was plain to see, but despite her composure, Percy saw that she was clearly nervous and uncomfortable when she took the seat he offered. What the devil had Wyatt done?

  “Is there a problem with Wyatt, Miss Thompson? I was not aware that you were his teacher.” He made the point not to give the impression that he was one of those fathers who was on top of everyone who affected his son, but out of surprise that he had never met her. For the last few years, he had served as president of the school board. One of his functions was to greet personally the teachers new to the Howbutker Independent School District at the annual welcome reception.

  “I was engaged to finish out the term for Miss Wallace, who married earlier in the year,” Miss Thompson explained. “She and her husband moved to Oklahoma City. Miss Wallace, as you may recall, was Wyatt’s original teacher.”

  Percy leaned back in his chair, templing his fingers, enjoying her clear, pleasing voice. “I am sure the change has not been to his detriment,” he said with a gracious inclination of his head.

  “I hope you will continue to think so when you hear what I’ve come to say.”

  “I’m listening.”

  She took a deep breath, lowering her gaze momentarily in an apparent effort to renew her courage. Good Lord, Percy thought. What kind of grief had Wyatt given her? He’d make sure he regretted it, if it was as bad as Miss Thompson seemed to imply. Still, it was easy to see how an eleven-year-old boy on the verge of puberty might be guilty of inappropriate behavior in order to gain her attention. She was a very pretty young woman, with clear hazel eyes and neatly bobbed hair evocative of the innocent shade of new wheat.