by Cathy Holton
When the phone rang she almost didn’t answer it. But she was glad later that she had, glad for the confession Will allowed her, although she could not shake the feeling that there was something else required of her, some act of contrition, some sacrifice.
The feeling of relief she’d felt after leaving Jacob’s office had not lasted, of course. It had swelled into a feeling of hopelessness and despair, a sense that, up to now, she had wasted her life on things that weren’t important. A childhood spent being the responsible one, making sure the rent was paid and the bill collectors were kept at bay, had formed her. Had crippled her. She had planned her escape from her mother all those years ago, had followed that plan persistently, and yet here she was at twenty-eight, sitting alone in her expensive apartment with her expensive furniture wondering what purpose her life had. It was ridiculous, really, and pathetic.
Perhaps it was grief over her mother’s sudden death swamping her finally, guilt and regret that they had not spoken in more than a year. Who knew how swiftly and unexpectedly death could come?
Or perhaps it was the letter.
It lay crumpled in a ball on the floor, and she leaned over and scooped it up. Will was telling her tales of the quirky inhabitants of Woodburn, trying to entice her with stories of his cousin, Fraser Barron, who dressed up as Edgar Allan Poe and did recitations of “The Raven” at cocktail parties.
“He must be a lot of fun,” Ava said.
“You have no idea.”
She smoothed the letter on her lap. It was written in a childish scrawl. I was so sorry to hear about your mother, he had written. She loved you very much. He had signed it, Frank. Not Love, Dad or Your father but just plain Frank, exhibiting a refreshing lack of sentimentality. She could relate to that; respected it, actually.
She picked up the flap of the torn envelope, looking at the return address. 1645 Hennipen Street, Garden City, Michigan. Her father, who she’d thought dead all these years, had lived only a few hours away.
She felt a stab of anger at Clotilde for lying to her, for depriving her all those years of the fiction of a living, loving father.
Will repeated his offer of a change of pace, a new beginning in Tennessee. He seemed to be weighing each word, coaxing her along like he would a timid bird with bread crumbs. “Just come for the summer,” he said.
Ava was surprised to find that she was weeping. “I’ll think about it,” she said.
She stopped for gas at a cinder-block convenience store, a short, squat building with a hand-lettered sign out front that read Guns. Bait. Day Care. The store looked old but the pumps were new. Ava swiped her card and then stood waiting for the tank to fill. She stretched her arms above her head and leaned back slightly, gazing across the road at a field of soybeans. Or at least she assumed that they were soybeans. A man in overalls at the last gas station had told her that soybeans were the staple crop in this area.
The green fields, the glittering road, the hard-baked grass of the clearing all seemed flattened and diminished beneath the weight of the noonday sun. Cicadas sang in the stillness. Far off across the fields, a distant fringe of forest stood outlined against a bleached sky. Ava ran her fingers through her short, spiky hair. Behind her a screened door slammed, and a moment later a woman’s voice said, “Oo-ee, it’s a scorcher. I’ll bet its 90 in the shade and here it is only May. Hot as road tar in July, as my daddy used to say, and he should know, he lived through enough heat spells in his time.” Ava turned around to see who the woman was talking to and was surprised to see that it was her.
“Excuse me?” she said nervously.
“Hot as a June bride in a feather bed,” the woman continued, chuckling softly and patting her top lip with a Kleenex. She was an elderly woman in a flowered dress with a large black purse shaped like an anvil strapped to one arm. “And he should know, ’cause he got the sunstroke on a day like this, working on the barn roof with his brother, Dooly.” Ava glanced anxiously at the store. The woman appeared to be unsupervised. There was no other car at the pumps, and no one had followed her out. She opened her purse and dropped the Kleenex inside, then snapped it shut. She reminded Ava a little of the deranged Bette Davis character in that old movie about the elderly sisters.
The woman tilted her head up at the sky, remembering. “It was a hot, sunny day in nineteen thirty-six, a Tuesday, I believe it was, or no, no, a Thursday. The wind was from the southeast, and he and Dooly were up there on the barn shingling in the heat. All of a sudden Daddy stood up and took off his hat and said, ‘Dooly, there’s a goat in the horse trough,’ and then he fell off the roof. His eyes just rolled up in his head and he went over backwards like a snake-handling Pentecostal. Would have killed himself, the doctor said later, if he hadn’t gone all limp before he fell.”
The woman, whose eyes were bright and curious as a little sparrow’s, had moved up close enough to the car to see Clotilde strapped into the front seat. “That sure is a pretty vase,” she said.
Ava stopped pumping gas. She screwed the cap on and closed the lid with a thud. “How close to Woodburn are we?” she asked.
“Woodburn? Oh, about thirty-five miles, I’d say. You have business in Woodburn, do you?”
Ava hung the nozzle back on the pump and didn’t wait for a receipt. “I have to go now.”
The woman folded her arms across her stomach. She smiled. “You aren’t from around here, are you,” she said.
A few miles down the road Ava began to sneeze, so she put the windows up and turned on the air-conditioning. She passed a sign that read Woodburn—30 miles and she realized she would be arriving early. She’d have to stop in one of the small shops in town to kill some time, to pick up a gift for the aunts.
“Try to arrive by Toddy Time,” Will had told her. “That’s around five o’clock.”
“What’s Toddy Time?”
“Cocktail hour.”
She’d been surprised, this far south in the Bible belt.
He laughed. “You do realize this is the home state of Jack Daniel’s?”
She glanced at herself in the mirror, running her hand through her spiky hair. She’d never worn it short before and she was still getting used to the look. She had cut it the night Will called, the day she got the letter from her father, going into the bathroom and clipping great handfuls while tears streamed down her cheeks. When she finished, her head felt lighter; she could see patches of scalp glimmering through the wispy curls.
“My God, what have you done to yourself?” Jacob said when he saw her.
“I’m leaving,” she told him. “Consider this my two-weeks’ notice.”
“Leaving to go where?”
Gripped by a sudden desire to make herself seem less pitiful, she said, “I’m spending the summer at a writers’ colony.”
He said carelessly, “I didn’t know you were a writer.”
“There’s a lot you don’t know about me.”
He didn’t come to the Deliverance Party and Ava was relieved. Later she drank too much and pulled Colleen aside and told her everything.
It was the last bit of unfinished business she felt she had before leaving Chicago.
She took her time heading south, driving first to Detroit and then meandering down I-75 in her used Saab. She spent the first night in a bed-and-breakfast outside of Cincinnati, where she lay awake listening to the clattering din of the crickets. She finally fell into a restless sleep but awoke some hours later to one of her night terrors, lying motionless and sweating until the spell passed. A trail of moonlight lay across the bed. She could hear the steady ticking of a clock somewhere deep within the house but she could not sleep again, tossing and turning until the clock chimed six and the first rosy fingers of daylight pushed themselves through the blinds.
As she prepared to leave, she thought of the characters in Russian novels who always said a prayer of protection before a journey. Even Tolstoy during his period of late-life despair would, she imagined, have prayed before fleeing his estate. Or
ganized religion was something else Clotilde had thought unnecessary for Ava to experience, although she had espoused a kind of new-age spirituality: crystals and karma and past-life regressions.
As if this life hadn’t been traumatic enough. A sudden defiance swept Ava. She bowed her head and prayed aloud, “Lord, bless this journey and keep me safe from harm.” And holding the vase aloft and giving Clotilde a sly grin, she said, “And bless this one, too, and forgive her her many sins. Amen.”
Another road sign appeared, announcing Woodburn—20 miles. She passed a group of cows standing motionless beneath the shade of a spreading tree. A shimmering pond reflected the metallic-colored sky.
Despite Will’s reassurances that she would like Woodburn and she would fit in fine, Ava felt like a stranger in a strange land. And it wasn’t just the dappled quality of the light, the small shotgun houses with their overgrown lawns and cement statuary, and the railroad crossings standing like sentries in the dusty little towns that made her feel this way. The people, too, seemed odd, almost frightening, with their overt displays of friendliness. Chicago was a friendly city, but people didn’t wave to one another as they drove down the streets, and they didn’t reveal their family histories to strangers at the gas pump.
She thought of Will, whom she hadn’t seen in years, a man who was almost a stranger to her. She pictured Josephine, the tall stern woman with the piercing eyes whom she had met at Will’s graduation. She thought of the bridges she had burned, the career she had left behind in ruins so she could pursue some wild dream she might never be able to attain.
For the first time since leaving Chicago, a vague sense of misgiving bloomed in her chest.
Woodburn
Ava had pictured Woodburn as a sleepy little crossroads with Will’s home perched like Graceland at the end of a long avenue of oaks. She was surprised to find a neat, quaint little town with tree-lined brick streets laid out around a square of prosperous shops. The houses, a mixture of antebellum, Victorian, and neoclassical architecture, stood back from the streets across broad landscaped lawns in neighborhoods that formed ever-widening squares around the center of the town.
She stopped at a gourmet kitchen store and bought a gift basket of assorted coffees, ceramic mugs, and tea towels to give to the aunts. All the stores on the square had green awnings and window boxes filled with geraniums. They all faced the statue of the Unknown Confederate Soldier that stood on a pedestal in the middle of a neat lawn scattered with trees and park benches. Ava sat for a while on one of these benches, sipping an iced coffee and watching the shoppers who trolled the storefronts. The town was close enough to Nashville to look prosperous. Will had told her many of the country music millionaires were settling out here.
She also bought a map and spent some time driving through the pleasant neighborhoods. The Woodburns’ house was on a street a few blocks from the square. It was not as grand as she had envisioned it; there were no white columns but instead a deep porch that ran across the front and down one side. Long shuttered windows stood on either side of a graceful mahogany door crowned by a fanlight. The lawn was trimly cut, crowded at the edges with dogwoods and long banks of pink and white azaleas. A graveled drive curved along one side of the house toward a detached garage in the back. A Ford pickup truck was parked in the drive.
Ava drove slowly past, not wanting to appear earlier than the five o’clock Toddy Time. Will had promised to meet her at the house so she wouldn’t have to face the aunts alone.
There were only a few houses along this street, all with expansive lawns and well-maintained exteriors. Each house had its own historical plaque tacked to the front, and the one in front of the aunts’ house read Woodburn Hall, c. 1821. The street sign read River Road, and Ava discovered why when, a block from the house, the street curved sharply to the left and continued along a narrow, swiftly moving river. It was all woods and heavy undergrowth here; the town ended abruptly. Ava followed River Road for perhaps a quarter of a mile, until it intersected a two-lane county highway that crossed the river over a narrow bridge. She turned right onto the highway, crossing the Harpeth River, and drove for a mile or two. It was all farmland here; wide green fields, hazy beneath the afternoon sun, ran along both sides of the highway. She passed a sign that read Longford Plantation—8 miles.
She turned around and headed back, wondering if she might meet Will on the road. She would recognize him immediately, although she hadn’t seen him in nearly four years. She glanced at her closely cropped hair in the mirror. He, of course, would be less likely to recognize her.
William Woodburn Fraser. When they were in college she had teased him once about his middle name being the same as his hometown.
“Why were you named after a town?” she’d asked.
He laughed. “It’s the other way around,” he said.
The truck was still parked in the drive beside Woodburn Hall, and Ava wondered if it might be Will’s. She felt a slight cramp of nervousness in her stomach. Driving slowly along River Road toward the house from this angle, she could see that it was actually quite deep, with a long wing that extended back from the less-imposing facade.
She was tempted, for a moment, to drive past. To keep going. At the last minute she swung into the drive and pulled slowly up behind the truck. She parked and sat staring up at the house.
Will had explained to her that it was his great-great-great-great-grandfather’s summer cottage, built in the early years of the nineteenth century as a retreat. The planters and their families had come to town to socialize and to escape the yellow fever that raged on the plantations in July.
“Some cottage,” she said now to Clotilde.
The apprehension she had felt on the road caused her stomach to quake. She thought, What am I doing here?
Staring up at the house, she found herself wondering why Will had asked her to come, why he had seemed so intent on having her visit him in his own surroundings. It bothered her that she had not posed this question before. She had been so befuddled over her own life that she had not stopped to think about him: his motivations, his desires, the way he might see her. She hoped he had not misread her acceptance of his invitation. She hoped this would not be the end of a perfectly good friendship.
But then the back door swung open and he was coming down the steps to greet her, broad-shouldered and smiling, and she grinned and thought, It’ll be okay.
He had filled out in the four years since she had seen him last. The change suited him. She had forgotten how good-looking he was, or perhaps this was something she had never, for some reason, noticed. She was sorry now that she had cut her hair. He’ll think I’m plain, she thought.
“I like your hair,” he said, giving her a brief, fierce hug.
“I had a moment of insanity,” she said, running her fingers self-consciously through the short spikes.
“No, really. It suits you.”
She went around to the trunk of the car to get her suitcase.
“Here, let me get that,” he said. He had noticed the vase in the passenger seat; she saw his eyes flicker curiously over Clotilde’s final resting place, but he said nothing.
She stood with her hands shielding her eyes, staring up at the house. “This is some cottage,” she said. Her attention was caught by a slight movement at one of the upstairs windows, an arm drawing aside a curtain, but when she looked again, it was gone, and the curtain was still.
He closed the trunk. “We can get everything else later, once you’re settled.” He wore a blue shirt, rolled at the sleeves, and his hair curled damply against his collar.
“They’re all waiting for you in the library,” he said, and she thought she detected a slight nervousness in his voice.
She followed him up a brick sidewalk and a short flight of stairs, into a narrow screened porch that ran across the back of the house. A door to the left opened into the kitchen, and a door to the right opened into a small bedroom that had once served as the cook’s room. All this Will told her
as they climbed the stairs. He seemed to be trying to put her at ease, speaking in that low, pleasant voice he used with her sometimes. Or perhaps it was himself he was trying to put at ease. He explained that Fanny and Josephine were waiting for them, as was Fanny’s husband, Maitland. All three she had met at his graduation from Bard. They had also invited Clara McGann and Alice Barron, both childhood friends and neighbors of the aunts, to come over later.
“You’ll like them,” he assured her.
“How long does the drinking go on?”
He grinned at her over his shoulder. “You mean Toddy Time? It ends precisely at six o’clock and then there’s supper.”
She grinned. “Served by liveried footmen, no doubt.”
“You’ve been reading too many romance novels. There are no liveried footmen, no servants at all, I’m afraid.” He opened a pair of French doors that led into the main hall. The doors were quite tall, and the top halves were made with long wavy sheets of heavy glass. They looked like they might have come from a country house in Provence.
“Gracious, you’re not bringing her in the back way, are you?” someone called out.
Will closed the doors behind them. He put his hand on her back as if to steady her. His touch was warm, pleasant, mannerly. Authoritative in a quietly masculine way.
They stood in a center hallway that ran from the front door to the screened porch at the back. The hall was wide enough for various pieces of heavy antique furniture. Stepping into the house was like stepping into Alice’s looking glass; all scale and proportion seemed off. Viewed from the outside the house did not seem so extensive and imposing, but the interior was very large and grand, with high ceilings and spacious, ornately furnished rooms opening off the expansive center hallway. Scattered oriental rugs deadened their footsteps as they walked along the darkly polished, wide-planked floor. The house was very stately and well cared for, and yet there was a certain chill to the air, Ava noticed, an uneasy sensation that old houses sometimes convey, of ancient tragedy and loss.