Summer in the South

by Cathy Holton

  “They were as close as brothers at one time,” Josephine said. “But later they had—a falling-out. And Will has a good heart, he’s a good boy, a good man, but like all the Woodburns he has a streak of stubbornness. He has a tendency not to forgive people who have hurt him.”

  Fanny sighed. “Just like Papa,” she said. “So much like Papa.”

  “Having an unforgiving nature is not a good thing, of course, and we don’t encourage this estrangement.”

  “But it takes two to tango,” Fanny said wistfully. A big gray cat Ava had never seen before jumped up on her lap.

  “Yes, whatever it is that drove them to—” Josephine hesitated, and Ava could see that she was trying not to mention Hadley, not knowing how much Will had told her and not wanting to get him into any trouble. “To quarrel,” she finished lamely. “They’ll have to work it out between them. Will and Jake. And they will eventually, I feel sure of it.”

  The backdoor slammed and Alice walked into the kitchen wearing a turquoise tennis suit and a pair of pink Keds. “Aha,” she said. “I knew I’d find you two working her over.”

  “I’m beginning to understand now,” Ava said, putting her fork down and looking around the table. “You heard us arguing yesterday. Or maybe someone called and told you they’d seen me coming out of Jake Woodburn’s shop.”

  “Bingo,” Alice said, pouring herself a cup of coffee.

  “I think the important thing to remember,” Josephine continued calmly, indicating with a look that Alice should sit down and be quiet, “is that in the past Jake went after a girl he knew Will was in love with. He betrayed his trust.”

  “What about Hadley?” Ava said. “She betrayed his trust, too.”

  Alice sat down on the other side of Fanny. No one said anything. It was obvious that they held Hadley to a different standard.

  Alice stirred cream into her coffee. “He went after her even though she and Will had dated all through high school. And Will and Jake were cousins. You know that, right? Like brothers, really. I tell you, it was the talk of the town. And that’s why people pay so much attention when they see you and Jake together.” Ava opened her mouth to protest and Alice said quickly, “Not that anyone is suggesting that there’s anything improper going on between you and Jake. I’m just saying that people see you together and they’re curious. That’s why they talk.”

  Fanny sighed and plucked aimlessly at an errant curl. She leaned her cheek on the palm of one hand. “He always wanted whatever Will had. If Will had a new suit, then nothing would do but for Jake to have one, too. If Will got a new camera, Jake would sulk until he got one.”

  The implication was that Jake would not have bothered with Ava if it were not for the fact that Will was interested in her. Ava didn’t for one minute think that Fanny had meant to be offensive; still, the remark was insulting. And yet, the same thought had occurred to Ava herself on several occasions.

  Josephine said. “I know there’s nothing between you and Jake, but I wonder if it’s wise to be seen around town with him.”

  “I was looking at his furniture,” Ava said in a heavy tone. “In the middle of the morning. We weren’t doing anything inappropriate.”

  “Well, of course you weren’t!” Fanny cried staunchly.

  Josephine said quietly, “No one’s accusing you of anything.”

  “Really? Well, it sure sounds like someone is. It sure sounds like someone is implying that I did something wrong. I wish people would mind their own business. I can’t believe someone actually picked up the phone and called you to report something so ridiculous.” Ava wondered if Josephine had ever had to warn Hadley Marsh of inappropriate behavior; but no, Hadley was a Southern girl. She would have understood the intricacies of small-town social conduct.

  “It is one of the drawbacks of living in a small town,” Josephine said agreeably. She turned her face to the window, giving Ava time to collect herself. “No one’s saying either of you has done anything improper. I’m only bringing it up because I know how wounded Will would be if he saw you together.”

  Of course she was right. Ava felt a faint stirring of guilt. “Look,” she said. “I went by Jake’s shop because I’m writing an article on Woodburn and he’s been very helpful with some of the information he’s given me. He has a different perspective,” she finished lamely. “Having lived outside of the South.”

  “An article on Woodburn!” Fanny cried. “Oh, Sister, isn’t that wonderful?”

  “Wonderful,” Josephine said flatly.

  “What’s your angle?” Alice asked, leaning forward on her elbows. “Small welcoming Southern town versus big impersonal Yankee city?”

  “Alice!” Fanny said.

  “Ava doesn’t mind,” Alice said fiercely. “She doesn’t mind if I speak frankly about Yankees.” She patted Ava’s hand. “She’s one of us now.”

  “Gee, thanks,” Ava said.

  “Alice,” Josephine said in a warning voice.

  “No, Josephine, I will not be quiet.” Alice’s chin quivered and she looked defiantly around the table. “I’m sorry,” she said. “But the whole South’s being overrun with Yankees. They’re always rushing here and there, driving like maniacs, throwing up shopping malls and subdivisions where there used to be nothing but green fields and trees.”

  “I think that’s called progress,” Josephine said archly.

  “I don’t care what it’s called.” Alice said. “It’s mucking things up.”

  Josephine and Alice immediately launched into an argument over the good old days versus the present, with Josephine taking the side of progress and Alice arguing for the old agrarian society. Fanny leaned her chin on one hand and stared dreamily out the window as if she wasn’t listening to either one. Ava was relieved that the conversation had shifted away from her “article” about Woodburn, and from Jake. Despite the fact that she agreed with them, in theory, that Jake shouldn’t have gotten involved with Hadley, she couldn’t help but feel oddly defensive of him. Certainly she could identify with him: a poor boy from the wrong side of the tracks who finds himself suddenly taken up by the aristocratic Woodburns, a family who could provide him with an education, a comfortable lifestyle, and therefore a brighter future than any he might have provided for himself. And really, was it any different with Ava herself? If Will had not provided her with the means to quit her day job and spend the summer down here rent-free, would she have ever had the opportunity to finish a novel? Not likely.

  And the Woodburns had given her an even greater gift. They had given her the story of Charlie and Fanny.

  “Progress brings jobs,” Josephine said. “Without jobs all of our young people have to grow up and move away.”

  Fanny turned a hopeful gaze on Ava. “Do you think you would ever want to settle in Woodburn?”

  “Oh, I don’t know,” Ava said vaguely. “I have my work in Chicago.”

  “Can’t you write anywhere?” Alice asked sharply.

  “Well, yes.”

  Fanny smiled tenderly. “Maybe you could spend part of the year living down here?”

  “Don’t be ridiculous,” Josephine said. “She’s young, and she lives in one of the most vibrant cities in the world. Why would she ever want to live in sleepy little Woodburn?”

  This seemed to put an end to the discussion. Alice finished her coffee and stood up, stretching. “So are we finished warning Ava about Jake Woodburn? Because I’ve got things to do.”

  “Is that what this is?” Ava asked, grinning. “An intervention?”

  “You’ll only need an intervention if you take up with Jake,” Alice said “If he sets his sights on you, there could be trouble.”

  Ava smiled, stacking her dishes. “Did you think to warn Hadley about him?”

  No one said anything. Josephine stood and began to gather the dishes from the table.

  “What was she like?” Ava asked, realizing she’d said the wrong thing but unwilling to change the subject.

  “Hadley? She wa
s beautiful,” Alice said. “There’s a photo of her and Will taken out at Longford. They used to go out there all the time while they were courting.”

  Ava said, “Courting?”

  “It was all Will ever wanted,” Josephine said. “Longford and a family. We used to go out there when he was a boy and he’d say, ‘Aunt Josie, I’m going to have ten kids, five boys and five girls.’ I guess it’s common for only children to want big families.”

  Fanny shook her head sadly. “Poor Will,” she said.

  “I suppose he always blamed himself,” Alice said. “For what happened to Hadley.”

  “It’s in the past,” Josephine said, glancing severely at Alice. “None of it matters now.”

  Outside the window a mockingbird sang sweetly. The sun slanted through the long windows, filling the room with light.

  “Still, it was a tragic way to die. She was a beautiful girl. And so young.”

  “Such a lovely face,” Fanny said dreamily. “So perfect on the outside.”

  And it wasn’t until much later, alone in her room and waiting for her muse to find her, that Ava thought how curious that statement was.

  Over the next two weeks, Ava worked with passionate and relentless determination. She had Charlie’s character right now, she was sure of it, and that was propelling him toward his tragic end. She was still uncertain exactly who had done the killing, but she knew it had been murder. The story was unfolding as it should. It was only a matter of time before the true killer revealed him- or herself.

  Caught up in her work, she had little time to worry about her social life. Jake didn’t call. Will, eventually, did. She didn’t press him, as Fraser had suggested she do. She didn’t try to get him talking about what had happened between him and Jake. It seemed unimportant to her, and she was hesitant to break the uneasy peace that fell between them. It was easier to work when Will was appeased; it was easier to live undisturbed in the house with the aunts.

  Will left her alone to work but when he did see her he seemed nervous, as if he realized that what was between them wasn’t working but he was unwilling to let it go.

  And Jake? Perhaps what everyone said was true; perhaps he was only a womanizer intent on conquest, and she had made it too difficult for him. Perhaps he had simply lost interest. Or maybe it was as he had intimated, that his guilt over once again pursuing Will’s girl had proven too much for him.

  Whatever his reasons, he didn’t call.

  It was all right with her. She had no time for anything but her work. Writing was the thing that drove her, the thing that gave meaning to her life. She realized that now. What had once been important she had put away for months, years while she worked dull day jobs in order to pay her rent. Because that was what happened if you weren’t careful. You put away your treasure in order to live in the real world, and soon it became dusty, forgotten, something to be trotted out in blushing acknowledgment at cocktail parties. It became a hobby, like Will’s music had become. The thing that had once given meaning to your life became diminished, small, something you could barely remember.

  She could never be happy with the life Will offered. She saw that now. She could never be happy subjugating her life to his, disappearing into the role of wife, mother, keeper of the hearth. It wouldn’t be enough for her. She was a writer. Her life turned on the rhythm of a sentence, a snatch of dialogue. Whole worlds opened at the thought of a young man, impoverished and alone in the world, returning to his ancestral home in search of love and redemption. Odysseus returning home to Penelope. Princess Sheelin returning home with the One True Pearl.

  It was her mother’s legacy to Ava, these stories. Writing was Ava’s treasure, but the stories had been Clotilde’s.

  Every evening while the house slept around her, Ava worked. And then in early August, perhaps because of the strain she was feeling in her relationship with Will or the long hours she was working on her novel, the night terrors returned. She awoke on two consecutive nights to the sound of someone whispering her name. She lay there with her eyes wide, a sensation of dread prickling her scalp. The feeling that she was being watched, the sense that there was someone in the room with her was so intense that even after the paralysis subsided, she was afraid to turn her head to look. When she did, that first night, there was no one there.

  But on the second night the feeling of vague unease continued, and as the paralysis waned she turned her head and caught something out of the corner of her eye, a dark fleeting figure that flickered and disappeared through the wall like a column of smoke.

  Hippie Girl

  August 1st

  Dear Ava—

  I’m sorry to take so long with this. I’ve been thinking a lot about what I had to say and it seemed best to do it on the phone but I don’t have your number. So I’ll just have to write it. I’m not good at writing things down, so please forgive how messy this is. Also I can’t spell worth a damn but you already know that.

  I laughed when I read the part in your last letter about how Meg told you her and me met out at Boblo Island. I always called your mother Meg because that was her real name, Margaret Anne Govan. I never called her by any of those hippie names she liked to use. She was from Grosse Pointe, Michigan, and I’ll get into all that in a minute. I have to write it down straight, just the way I’m thinking it. Otherwise I’ll start to ramble and this will be twenty pages long.

  The only time we were ever out at Boblo was when you were a baby and we went out there to hear Mitch Ryder and the Detroit Wheels. I met your mother at a Kmart parking lot. She was there with the Sunshine People. They were a bunch of hippies who traveled around the country in an old school bus painted with peace signs and flowers. They had parked their bus in the Kmart lot and they were selling love beads. I walked by and saw your mother and it was love at first sight. I can tell you that. My heart just flopped around in my chest. She had long red-gold hair and she was wearing a white dress that fell to her ankles but it was kind of thin so I could see her shape right through it. She was the loveliest thing I’d ever seen.

  I was working at a machine shop in those days and I never looked back. I told my friends, you go on without me. I’m staying here. The Sunshine People took me in because that’s how it was in those days. Flower Power and free love and all that shit. Excuse my French. It was, “Hi, how’s it going, man? Want to go to California?” There were ten of us on that bus, six women and four men, and we were all a little in love with Meg. Dharma. That’s the name she went by then, although I never called her anything but Meg.

  She was a couple of years older than me. She’d been to college at Ann Arbor, although she’d dropped out without telling her parents when she hooked up with the Sunshine People. She was a rich girl, she was from Grosse Pointe, and her dad was a bigwig out at Ford. I don’t know what her mother did. Spend money, Meg said. She was an only child. Raised in the lap of luxury with every privilege. There was bad blood between Meg and her dad; she never told me why, but she wouldn’t talk about him, and maybe that’s why she never saw her parents. I got a call years after we parted from some private investigator her dad had hired to track her down. He didn’t get shit out of me. Bastard.

  The six months I spent traveling around the country with your mother and the Sunshine People were the happiest days of my life. I won’t lie to you. I still think of those carefree times now that I’ve got a mortgage and a wife and three kids to feed. Did I tell you I had three kids? Tom, he’s sixteen, Ralphie, he’s twelve, and little Lorie, she’s ten.

  Your mother was a storyteller. I guess you know that. We’d sit around the fire at night and she’d tell stories that made you shiver with fear or cry with sadness. She had a good heart. She was always looking out for others, always looking out for the underdog. She couldn’t stand to see anyone picked on. Once outside a convenience store in Topeka she saw a man beating a tethered dog. She hit this guy in the back with a camp stove and knocked him down, and then she stood over him, flailing away with a bag of hot dog
buns and shouting, “How do you like it, huh? How do you like it?”

  It was the funniest thing I ever saw. She was small but she was crazy. I loved her. You have to know that. It wasn’t my idea that we part.

  Still, she was a difficult woman to live with. She had her own way of looking at things, and she didn’t like anyone telling her what to do. She had her dark days, too, just like the rest of us. She used to cry out in her sleep, and she would wake up whimpering and wouldn’t let anyone comfort her. Would just sit there with her knees drawn up against her chest rocking back and forth and whimpering, and if you tried to touch her she’d bare her teeth and hiss and claw like a scalded cat. I still don’t know what that was all about.

  When you came along, she changed. A lot of the wildness seemed to go out of her. You asked me if I knew who your real father was, and I have to say, honestly, I don’t. Meg never told me. Still, I had my suspicions. I’m happy to talk about what I know, but I don’t feel right writing it down in a letter.

  Call me if you want to talk about this. My number’s 313-886-5105.

  Frank

  p.s. Thanks for sending along a photo. Funny, how you look like her.

  Coming as it did during a period of intense work on her novel, the letter only added to Ava’s fairy-tale view of reality. Shut up in the old house, Ava found herself working feverishly every night, long into the early hours of the morning, the words “Help me” echoing in her head. Time seemed to move now in swoops and snatches; it had lost its linear arrangement. Perhaps it was the thick drowsy heat of August that made her feel as if she was moving through an underwater world.

  “A rich girl,” the letter had said. Clotilde had been “raised in the lap of luxury with every privilege.” It was almost laughable. Certainly ironic. Ava thought of all the times she had done battle with irate landlords and debt collectors, the nights she had lain awake wondering if they would be homeless, if there would be money for school lunches and electricity bills. She thought of her ruined childhood, the stubbornly responsible character she had become so that her mother could remain carefree and childish. (“Oh Ava, don’t fret. Everything will turn out fine—you’ll see!”) All those years of worry and want and desperation, when all Clotilde ever had to do was pick up the phone and call her rich father.