Somerset

by Leila Meacham

  Thomas contemplated his mother. He would never have positive proof that the daughter interred next to his son had been blood of his blood, flesh of his flesh, but he was sure enough of Priscilla to believe the logic of the living legend sitting across from him. His mother had never steered him wrong. What was more, she was convinced that Regina was his child, a vote of confidence good enough for him. A feeling of deliverance swept through him like a man drawing fresh air into his nostrils after being buried alive. He stood up on the brink of tears and bent to kiss the cheek of the woman who had given him life. Of course he forgave her. She had suffered the doubt of Regina’s paternity longer than he and now must live out her life regretting the affection she’d denied the best of the Tolivers.

  He wiped away a drop of moisture that had fallen on her cheek. “Thank you, Mother. Sleep well. I certainly will.”

  “Must you be in such a hurry, son? Where are you off to this time of night?”

  Thomas retrieved the volume. “To see Vernon. I must tell my son his mother is dying.”

  Jessica listened to Thomas’s footsteps fade away and fancied they sounded lighter despite the sadness of his mission. How thankful she was to have lived long enough to relieve her son from the pain she’d been ignorant of all these years. She was grateful, too, for the inspiration that had enabled her to shift the proof of her granddaughter’s paternity onto Priscilla. Thomas believed her, and now his mother no longer had to dread the conversation she may have had with him if he’d pressed her for the truth as she believed it.

  I knew long ago that Regina was your daughter, Thomas. Tippy told me that one day I’d know for sure whether she was of your flesh and blood.

  How? How did you know?

  Because Regina died, my son. If she’d been another man’s daughter, she would have lived.

  But, of course, she’d never have that conversation with Thomas. As a mother, she would never relieve her son’s doubt by burdening him with guilt. Thanks to Priscilla, she’d convinced him through reason, the only language Thomas understood.

  Priscilla had pointed him in the right direction when she told him to read the history of the Tolivers. The proof he sought was right before him in the genealogical charts, but Thomas would never see it. Her son did not believe in the curse, but Priscilla did.

  Eight years ago, the night they brought Regina’s body home for burial, Vernon had come to her room bleary-eyed with grief at his sister’s death and the certainty his parents’ marriage was irrevocably over. What curse was his mother screaming about, he’d wanted to know. He’d been twenty-two at the time, stunningly handsome, but grief had reduced him to the little boy who used to crawl into his grandmother’s lap when in need of “sugar time,” as Amy called it.

  Jessica had related the basis for the superstition and watched the skepticism grow in her grandson’s expression.

  When she’d finished, Vernon had summarized. “Let me be sure I understand, Granmama. This…hex on Somerset started when my grandfather married you rather than the woman he’d promised to marry and as a result, his son died and you were unable to bear any more children after my father?”

  Jessica had conceded that the notion did sound far-fetched when considering that other families suffered similar tragedies, but there was the matter of Thomas’s children dying in his generation.

  “Caused by my father marrying my mother for the reason he did?” Vernon had stated incredulously.

  “That’s what your mother believes.”

  Vernon had blown out his cheeks in apparent relief. It was so easy for the young to mistake a simple explanation as the full answer to a troubling question. “Thanks for telling me, Granmama. I was afraid there was more to it. My poor mother is deranged, as she has every right to be.” He’d stood up, clearly satisfied, and given her a grin marked with sadness. “As you used to read to us from Aristotle, Granmama: ‘One swallow does not a summer make.’ So, I’m thinking the deaths in two generations, though they could be construed as consequences for wrongful marriages, do not constitute a pattern—or a curse. But just to be sure,” he said, “in the third generation, I won’t repeat the sins of the fathers. I’ll marry a woman I love.”

  As Vernon left, he looked back with a smile, reminding Jessica of Silas. As Thomas aged, he had fleshed out, and she could see the influence of the Wyndham males in his heavier shoulders and thicker girth, but Vernon’s figure, like his grandfather’s, would remain true to the slim, graceful stature of his aristocratic forebear.

  “And I will add this, Granmama,” Vernon said. “However wonderful the woman was back in South Carolina that my grandfather didn’t marry, he made no mistake in marrying you.”

  Jessica still felt a pleasurable warmth in remembering her grandson’s compliment and recalled her relief when he’d closed the door. She’d been afraid that Vernon would ask her if she believed in the curse. Two weeks afterwards, a headstone was erected to mark the grave of Regina Elizabeth Toliver McCord, and Jessica had cut a basket of red roses to lay at its feet.

  Chapter Ninety-Six

  The wives of Vernon, Jeremy III, and Abel delivered healthy nine-pound boys within weeks of one another in the fall of 1895. Darla requested their son be named Miles after her grandfather, and Vernon consented with no argument. The boy looked nothing like any member of his family but had inherited the high forehead and rather pointed nose of his wife’s father and other Henleys Vernon had seen in photographs. Jeremy III’s son was called Percy after an English ancestor, and the Abel DuMonts christened their male heir Ollie.

  The three infants took to one another right away, as had their mothers. Vernon was much relieved that Darla liked his best friends’ wives and enjoyed their company. He’d been worried that she would feel inferior to the finishing-school graduates who came from families of great wealth. Jeremy III’s wife was a high-spirited girl from Atlanta named Beatrice whose father owned a fleet of commercial ships. Abel had married a saucy debutante and manufacturing heiress nicknamed Pixie who hailed from Williamsburg, Virginia.

  There was much for a woman to envy about Pixie and Beatrice. Their husbands could afford them the best of everything, and if not their husbands, their own purses were available and bulging. Beatrice’s father presented the Warwicks III with a new house as a wedding present. He had met the Warwick clan in the prenuptial celebrations and decided that Warwick Hall, while large and magnificent, was too crowded for his daughter to begin her marriage. The baronial edifice housed the surviving members of three generations: Jeremy Sr., his two sons, Jeremy Jr. and Stephen and their wives, and the patriarch’s four bachelor grandsons, of whom Jeremy III was one. His daughter would get lost among so many Warwicks and have little voice in the running of the household.

  An antebellum home was razed on Houston Avenue and a magnificent new structure erected in its place. Every modern convenience was installed, wired, or introduced. The two-storied, columned showplace boasted flushing toilets, running tap water, and electric lights. No expense was spared on its décor, furnishings, or landscape.

  Abel and Pixie chose to remain in the family’s château-styled mansion with Armand, who had lost his wife to cancer the year before, and Jean, his other son who had never married. Pixie, an only child whose parents were deceased, said she loved the idea of “queening it over a house full of men.”

  Her subjects worshiped her and allowed her full sway to command as she saw fit. One of her first duties, tactfully assumed, was to bring new life into the house. The deaths of Armand’s mother, Bess, in 1893 and his wife in 1894 had shadowed the household. Before their demise, hardly an antimacassar had been changed for years out of respect to Henri. Pixie sensitively set about removing reminders of illness and loss. That meant replacing dark with light, the old with the new, the outdated with the modern—all without offending the tastes of the former mistresses. The result was an expensive marvel of grace and beauty that brought tears to Armand’s eyes. “Finally, we can breathe again in my old home,” he
said.

  The Warwicks and DuMonts were able to live lavishly. Their families were among the wealthiest in the state, though both clans eschewed conspicuous consumption. Timber had become Texas’s largest and most important revenue-producing enterprise, and the DuMont Department Store the leading shopping mecca in the state. It was the close of the Gilded Age in America, an era of unprecedented consumerism fostered by the growth of the railroads, finance, manufacturing, trade, new inventions, communications, and the discovery of oil. While Texas, along with the South, did not participate fully in the flourishing economy of the rest of the country, the state’s potential for financial growth was boundless. The only business sector struggling to pay its bills throughout the land was the agricultural industry. Drought, the boll weevil, low cotton prices, and exorbitant rail costs had begun to eat into the profits of Somerset.

  When they married, Vernon had hoped to give his wife everything her heart desired since she asked for and expected nothing but his love and attention, which he willingly and happily gave. To his surprise, since he’d not known how she’d react when he was eventually forced to explain the state of their finances, Darla accepted with grace the fact that she’d not married a rich man after all. “At least not one as prosperous as we Tolivers used to be,” Vernon told her, “but the tide will change, and the Tolivers will be in high cotton again—literally.”

  It would take a few more growing seasons for Somerset to reap the huge profits of former years that had made them wealthy, but Vernon and his father were confident the harvests would come. Good rains were expected. They read of new uses for cotton and cottonseed every time they opened the pages of The Farmer’s Manual and Complete Cotton Book, and competition in the U.S. for their product was dwindling as more farmers turned to other crops. Vernon and his father were getting a handle on the boll weevil through more efficient cultivation, the use of fertilizers to hasten ripening of shorter fiber varieties, and earlier planting in fields located away from swampy areas and woods where the beetle thrived. On the political front, Congress had begun enacting antitrust laws to break up the railroad monopolies that charged prohibitive freight rates, a great boon for farmers. If Darla would just be patient, Vernon told her, he could promise she’d be dressed in the finest the DuMont Department Store had to offer, and of course, eventually, as nature had its way, they’d move into the mansion on Houston Avenue.

  What did she need patience for, Darla said, batting her tawny lashes and drawing Vernon’s tall head down to her lips. She had everything she wanted right here in their dear little house with her husband and son.

  Vernon could hardly believe the marvel of his wife or the happiness she brought him. It took him several years to recognize the design behind her determination not to be bested by the best. Her beauty aside, for which she had no challenge, she did not attempt to compete. The Tolivers’ reduced circumstances were no secret among their intimate friends, so Darla simply made more impressive what she could do with little than Pixie and Beatrice could do with much.

  With amazing thrift—“from growing up poor,” she maintained—Darla could make a loaf from a crumb. With culinary wizardry, she orchestrated meals of inexpensive ingredients that brought ohs and ahs from those who could set more bountiful tables. She purchased house and dress fabrics from a warehouse in Marshall where merchants like Armand sent last year’s bolts to be sold at discount prices. When complimented on her window draperies and gowns that rivaled the finest worn by the more affluent, she was not above admitting that “with the help of Isaac Singer” her creations were made with her own little hands at her sewing machine.

  Their household staff consisted of only two servants, one of whom was Amy’s daughter, Sassie, who helped Darla look after Miles. Two maids were not sufficient to keep the house in the impeccable shape Darla demanded, so without a thought to her pride, so Sassie reported to Amy, “The mistress, she pitch in like a seaman bailin’ water outta a leakin’ boat.” No one visited the single-storied white clapboard rent house of the Vernon Tolivers’ residence without going away exclaiming over the shine and order of the place with its ambience of peace and harmony.

  Vernon idly wondered at his wife’s seemingly obsessive need to lord her skills at making much out of their limited resources over their best friends’ plentiful abundance. Among the three families of the Tolivers, DuMonts, and Warwicks, there had never been the faintest whiff of any member’s attempt to “outdo” the other. One’s economic circumstances and what one did with them were no consideration to the friendships. Vernon was grateful that Jeremy III and Abel had married wives who appreciated and supported their tight bond and were of the same unpretentious ilk as they.

  Vernon ascribed Darla’s excessive drive to her desire to make him proud of her. She never wanted him to regret not marrying someone prettier and richer. He assured her daily and nightly that she was all he could ask for in a wife. No woman walked the earth who could make him feel more like a king in his home, among his friends, and in society.

  He saw two clouds gathering that threatened to throw a cast over his domestic happiness. Despite their earnest efforts, Darla had not become pregnant again, but neither had Pixie and Beatrice, setting Vernon’s mind to rest over the vague, ridiculous possibility there could be something to the Toliver curse. The other was his disappointment in his son. Miles was now a full four years old. By his age, Vernon had often spent gleeful whole days with his father at Somerset. He loved being petted by the workers, eating watermelons right off the vine, seeing the animals, playing with the black children, but, most of all, he’d enjoyed riding in the saddle with his father into the fields. The same had been true of his father with his father. But Miles’ visits to the plantation ended in tears and tantrums within minutes after Vernon set him down from the wagon. A waterfall of whined complaints met every effort to coax his son into enjoying himself. He didn’t like being in the saddle. The horse scared him. The leather chapped his legs. The workers’ children played too rough. The pigs and goats smelled. The sun was too hot. The flies and mosquitoes bothered him. He was hungry. He was thirsty. He was bored. He wanted to go home.

  “He’s too young to feel what you do for the plantation, Vernon,” Darla said. “Give him time.”

  But Vernon had a sickening sense—perhaps unfounded, he would convince himself—that time would not change the boy’s dislike of being with his father on the land he loved. Darla was apathetic about the day-to-day toil and routine of the plantation that Silas Toliver had carved from the wilderness and his son Thomas had preserved at such great sacrifice. She exhibited polite but little interest when Vernon attempted to share events of his day that affected their livelihood. In those ways, he suspected Miles was like Darla. What would become of Somerset if his son and only descendant had no desire to follow in the footsteps of his forebears?

  But eventually, one of the clouds lifted. Darla announced she was pregnant.

  Chapter Ninety-Seven

  “Darla is hoping for another boy,” Jessica said to Jeremy.

  “A girl in the families would be nice,” Jeremy said. “They bring fresh air into the place. What is Vernon wishing for?”

  “A daughter would not be amiss with him, but our little girls have a way of dying.”

  “Ah,” Jeremy said, his customary response to statements requiring no further discussion. Jessica had learned to read its range of emotions as he had the expression of her eyebrows.

  “Vernon has confided to me that if the baby is a girl, he’ll insist she call him Daddy,” Jessica said. “He does not like it that Miles calls him Papa. Says it makes him sound and feel old, but Papa was Darla’s preference.”

  “Ah,” said Jeremy again.

  “Indeed,” agreed Jessica.

  It was autumn again, three months from the close of the nineteenth century, a much anticipated event nationwide that had sparked the friends’ earlier conversation in the gazebo. Jessica had informed Jeremy, who enjoyed her sharing the contents of her
readings with him, that the purists would have the new millennium begin January 1, 190l, because the Gregorian calendar numbered century years from 1 to 100. She was glad the pragmatists were not following the convention and were going with the ancient astronomers’ idea of numbering years from 0 to 99. She might not be alive to usher in the new century in 1901.

  “Now, Jess,” Jeremy cautioned.

  “Just stating the practical, Jeremy. The old body is wearing out, so it reminds me every morning I get out of bed.”

  “Yes, well…” Jeremy recrossed his legs on the swing of the gazebo, uncomfortable with the mention of the inevitable, Jessica recognized. She was eighty-two, and he ninety-three. She changed the subject. She’d received letters from Sarah Conklin and Tippy. The chamber of commerce had selected Sarah among Boston’s Women of the Century, and Tippy was launching a new line of feminine wear to support the vanguard of women emerging in society determined to be socially useful and personally autonomous.

  “Comfortable, practical, and aesthetically pleasing,” Jessica quoted Tippy’s description of her designs to which Jeremy returned his usual “Ah” in approval. Eventually, Jessica got around to the reason she’d sent word she’d like to see him. She reached for a small jewelry box she’d brought to the gazebo.

  “Jeremy, dear, I wonder if you’d do me a favor?”

  “Anything, Jess. You know that.”

  “Would you sell this for me?”

  Jessica opened the lid of the box containing the emerald brooch her father had presented her on her eighteenth birthday. Recognition and surprise flared in her old friend’s gaze.