Sweet Everlasting

by Patricia Gaffney

  Had he been listening? At that very second, Ty hollered down the stairs, “Mrs. Quick, ask Miss Wiggins if she’d care to come up and have a cup of tea in the kitchen, will you?”

  Mrs. Quick gave a sour-faced sniff and watched Carrie go.

  Carrie spent the morning moving from one room to another, trying to stay out of the housekeeper’s way while she went about her cleaning and straightening. At lunchtime, Ty came upstairs and ate a bowl of soup in the kitchen. Mrs. Quick wouldn’t let Carrie help serve him, but it was plain that she hated the idea of waiting on Carrie even more; so Carrie ended up not having anything until Ty left, and then serving herself a quick bite and eating it standing over the sink. Mrs. Quick’s humor didn’t improve when Ty told her Carrie was staying alone in his house all afternoon, and tonight he was personally escorting her home. “And tomorrow I’ll have a word with Billy Stonebrake,” he added. “So there’s no need for you to concern yourself about the unfortunate incident at all anymore, Mrs. Quick. You’ve been very kind. I appreciate it, and I’m sure Miss Wiggins does, too.”

  He certainly had a way about him. Carrie had to look away so Mrs. Quick couldn’t see her eyes twinkling. The mean old goose actually looked flattered.

  But what wasn’t amusing at all was Ty’s determination to “have a word” with Officer Stonebrake, who constituted the entire police department of Wayne’s Crossing. Last night she’d tried her best to talk Ty out of the idea, but he wouldn’t budge. All she wanted was to find a way to support herself independent of her stepfather, and she didn’t care scat about justice or due process or retribution. She particularly didn’t care for the idea of telling a stranger all about how Artemis had beaten her. But if Ty wanted her to, she guessed she’d have to go ahead and do it.

  After Mrs. Quick left—pointedly waiting till Tyler went back down to his office first, for propriety’s sake—Carrie was alone in the house. Every once in a while she’d hear a high-pitched holler from downstairs, which upset her until she considered that each yell might mean one less child coming down with diphtheria or smallpox. After that, every outraged shriek almost made her smile.

  She found a needle and thread in Ty’s bathroom cabinet and sewed up the long rip in her dress. After that she felt sleepy and lay down on his bed for a nap. Waiting to fall asleep, she thought back over a conversation they’d had sometime in the middle of the night. He’d asked her where she was in her “cycle,” and it had taken her an embarrassingly long time to figure out what in the world he was talking about. When she’d given him the answer, she could tell he was relieved, but she hadn’t understood why until he explained about the different times of the month when it was harder for a woman to conceive a child. For some reason the conversation had depressed her, almost made her feel ashamed. No—not the conversation, she realized. Ty’s relief was what had depressed her. Even now, the memory of it brought a cold, scary loneliness she knew would stay with her for a long, long time. She fell into a restless sleep.

  Loud barking woke her up—Louie at the kitchen door, wanting to come in. He was a silly, gentle dog, gawky as a new calf. She’d have petted and played with him all afternoon, but he had too much energy to stay inside for long. She let him out again and wondered what to do with herself next.

  Ty’s sitting room fascinated her. Books and magazines were always scattered around everywhere—although in neat piles for a while after Mrs. Quick left—and they were the kinds of books and magazines Carrie had seen in the public library but never in real people’s houses. Not even Mr. Odell or Dr. Stoneman had as many books as Ty did, and certainly none with titles like Studies in the Psychology of Sex or Naturalism and Agnosticism or Das Kapital. The magazines he read were different from other people’s, too; he didn’t get the Saturday Evening Post, he got Scribner’s and Harper’s, which were ninety-nine percent words, no pictures at all to speak of.

  The book lying open on his desk now was called The Scourge of Yellow Fever. Thumbing through it, she saw that most of it was too technical to comprehend, but the preface was in plain English. The extent of the disease and the devastation it caused surprised her, even though Ty had spoken of it to her before. In the last hundred years, she read, in the Caribbean alone, it had killed a hundred thousand people. And it wasn’t just a tropical disease: in bad years it could spread as far as Philadelphia or even Boston; in 1878, four years before she was born, twenty thousand people in the Mississippi Valley died of it.

  Ty had told her about the different theories there were nowadays for what caused it—that a mosquito carried it, that dirty water and poor sanitation spread it, that germs in the air were responsible—but he’d never once talked about what it had felt like when he’d nearly died of it. The description she found of the disease’s progress explained why. It was horrible. She wished she hadn’t found it; once she had, she had to read to the bitter end. The sickness came on all at once with a chill or sudden dizziness or a headache so violent it could jerk you out of bed, retching. The second stage lasted about three days, when your fever could reach a hundred and ten. Your muscles and joints felt as if they were in a vise, you were nauseated, your headache was excruciating, and all the while a strange excitement made you act as if you were mad or drunk.

  Then, miraculously, all the symptoms disappeared; the vise released you and at last you could rest. You woke up refreshed, thinking the worst was over. But it was a trick. The toxemia had destroyed your liver, and now the terrible hemorrhaging, the “black vomit” of blood and digestive enzymes set in. Jaundiced, bleeding from everywhere, you died in a coma, or from convulsions, or by fainting from heart failure.

  Sickened, Carrie slapped the book shut and put it back where she’d found it. Ty said he was an “immune,” he couldn’t get the disease again because he’d already had it. What if he was wrong? Doctors didn’t know everything—they didn’t even know what caused it! What if he got it again, even a milder case of it? Or what if, having a weakness for it now, he got a worse case and died? She wound her arms around herself, shuddering. Oh, God! All the dreadful images would stay in her mind forever now. She wouldn’t mention it to Tyler, though; he would only worry because she was worried, and she already knew all the things he would say to try to make her stop. And none of them would do any good.

  She shouldn’t have looked at the dratted book, and a few minutes later she’d have the joyless satisfaction of saying the same thing to herself again, this time after opening a small, leather-bound photograph album that lay on the table by the window. She’d never seen it before. She was restless, bored, disturbed; the book was fat, intriguing, harmless-looking. The inscription inside, under a recent date, read, “For Ty, lest you forget us utterly! With all our love, Abbey.” Leaning against the windowsill, Carrie began to turn the pages.

  She’d always known—she’d have to be blind not to—that Ty’s world was different from hers, or for that matter anyone else’s in Wayne’s Crossing. But these photographs, lovingly pasted in the book by his sister with humorous captions and sayings, widened me difference from a gap to a chasm. There was Ty in 1881, tall already at nine years old in his knee socks and knickers and Russian blouse, posing with his classmates on the steps of a building called the Delancey School. There he sat in a sled with his baby sister, in front of a great, snowy, four-story castle—“Christmas at the Camp, Scarborough, 1882,” read the caption. There were pictures of him standing among rows of distinguished gentlemen, members of the Racquet Club, the Rittenhouse Club, the Philadelphia Club. Here he was playing cricket, here tennis, here baseball. “Schuylkill Regatta” showed him in a straw hat and a striped jacket, young and unbearably handsome, holding a trophy on the deck of a sailboat. “Summer ’89, the Cape May cottage” made Carrie gape, for the “cottage”—like the “Camp”—was a mansion, three floors of porches and chimneys and turrets stretching across a wide, perfect lawn that ended at a cliff right over the ocean. The faces of his mother, father, and sister were familiar to her now—elegant, distinguish
ed people in their graceful clothes, smiling and refined, so quietly self-confident. Ty’s best friend was someone named Scottie, a stocky, sandy-haired young man who showed up first in pictures from Harvard, and regularly from then on. “Ty and Scottie in Scotland, Potting at Defenseless Animals,” read one caption; “Ty and Scottie Losing to Adele and Me!!” read another—a blurred badminton foursome.

  There were more of “Adele” after that. In “Ty and Adele in the Caboose,” they were waving from a train; “Ty and Adele in flagrante” showed them holding hands on a porch swing; in “2nd Phila. Assembly, 1897,” they posed in gorgeous formal clothes with more beautiful young people.

  But worse was the last picture in the album, a solitary portrait of the dark-haired, light-eyed Adele. Her soft, mysterious smile might mean anything. She was so beautiful, Carrie ached. For once the caption wasn’t in Abbey’s handwriting. “Nothing’s the same without you, Ty. Come home soon. Your Del.”

  Have you done what we did with lots of women? she’d been idiotic enough to ask him last night. If she knew anything at all, she knew with total certainty that he had never, ever done what they’d done with Adele. Not Adele, with her high lace collar and her cameo brooch, her gleaming upswept hair and intelligent forehead. A woman like that wouldn’t let a man touch her the way Carrie had let Ty. Had begged Ty. She wouldn’t lie naked in a bathtub for him to stare at, or spread her legs so he could kiss her the way men must kiss whores in exchange for money—

  White-faced, nearly faint with shame, Carrie closed the album and put it back exactly where she’d found it. Rather than cry, she went back into the bedroom, lay down, and fell instantly asleep.

  When she woke up, the clock on the bedside table had run down. She sat up groggily, rubbing her eyes. She couldn’t hear anything from downstairs—maybe he was finished for the day. Maybe he was waiting for her to wake up so he could take her home.

  But he wasn’t in the house. The sitting room clock said six-ten. She got a glass of water in the kitchen and drank it over the sink; then another. She was washing the glass when she heard footsteps on the porch stairs. Ty came through the screen door with a panting Louie on his heels. He was in his shirtsleeves, hair disheveled, face damp and flushed. He grinned when he saw her. Her heart turned inside out.

  “So, you’re awake. We went for a run, we thought you’d never—”

  She went to him and put her arms around his shoulders. She’d only meant to hold him, but the fire jumped between them, and he pulled her head back and kissed her with a rough, unsmiling urgency that went straight to the center of everything she was feeling, too.

  “When does it stop?” she gasped, hanging on with clutching hands. “I thought I could have enough, but—”

  He wouldn’t let her talk; he just wanted to kiss her. She pulled her mouth away with a half-hysterical laugh. “Ty, does it just keep on and on? How do people get any work done?”

  He had her against the table, the edge hard against her hip. His sweeping arm dashed salt shaker, napkin rings, newspaper to the floor. She let him press her backward till her shoulder blades struck the hard wood.

  “Stay the night,” he said.

  “Yes.”

  “I’ll take you home in the morning.”

  “Yes.”

  “Early. No one will know.”

  They managed her skirts together, and he came into her at once. It was wanton and lewd, sinful. It was unrefined. But it went on and on, and when it ended the image of Adele she’d never stopped seeing shattered into as many pieces as her body. She heard herself cry out Ty’s name, and words that made no sense, and on an exhausted sigh afterward, “I don’t care, I love you, I don’t care.”

  A colorless dawn was graying around the edges of the curtain. The Carolina wren who nested in the forsythia bush was already up and singing. Carrie kept her fingers light and caressing in Ty’s hair, dreading the moment when he would wake. He’d only given in to his exhaustion a little while ago, and it helped a little to know that he was as unwilling to let the night slip past as she was. But it was over now, everything. What a lovely dream, but when he awoke it would be gone for good. So she soothed him the way a mother would soothe a sleeping child, to hold back the morning—the end.

  His face, pressed against the side of her breast, was pale from fatigue but still beautiful. She would not have thought any man, not even Ty, could touch a woman the way he’d touched her in the night, with such gentleness and generosity. She hadn’t felt ashamed in his arms, not for a minute, even though they’d been as intimate with each other’s bodies as she believed it was possible for two people to be. Thoughts of Adele—”your Del”—had come and gone and come again as the hours went by. But even with her new knowledge, Carrie couldn’t feel regret for what she’d done. She would do it all again, even if it was a sin, even if afterward Ty would never confuse her with a lady, because she belonged to him now with her whole self. Giving him her heart and soul without her body would’ve been wrong, more of a sin—God forgive her—than holding back and staying chaste. And if she went to hell for it … well, then she would go, with no defense except that she loved him. But she’d lost him, too, and that was a different kind of hell in advance.

  A violent pounding noise startled her so much, she jerked upright, jolting Ty out of his sleep. “What—?” she started to say, her heart tripping.

  “Downstairs,” he mumbled, already sliding away from her. With the speed of practice, he had his trousers and shirt on in half a minute, and then he was gone.

  She didn’t have long to miss him—but she didn’t need long. Resentment, anger, jealousy flooded through her; she actively hated the person banging on the door. Then she did feel ashamed.

  “Emergency,” he told her when he returned. “A child, I have to go.” He sat on the bed with his back to her, pulling on his shoes and socks. “Stay here until I come back. I don’t know how long. It might—”

  “No, Ty,” she said, quiet but firm. “I’ve got to go home.” He turned around, but she wouldn’t let him interrupt. “If he’s there, I’ll know before he sees me, and then I’ll just turn around and come back. I promise I won’t see him without you. It’ll be all right.”

  He kept shaking his head; she thought he was going to argue, but finally he said, “All right, Carrie. But swear to me again that you won’t go near him, no matter what.”

  “I swear. I’m telling you, I’ll know if he’s there and I’ll come back. Don’t worry.”

  He took her by the shoulders. “I’ll do nothing but worry until I see you again.” He gave her a quick, hard kiss. “Leave the mule at the livery and walk. It’s only half-light; be careful and don’t let anyone see you. Remember—you weren’t here, you went home last night.”

  “I’ll remember. But what shall I do about Petey?”

  “I’ll get him for you later today. I’ll tell Hoyle you remembered he had a stone in his foot and decided to leave him. Or—something, I’ll think of something.” He straightened his hair with his hands. “I’ve got to go.”

  “Yes, hurry.” It hurt her throat to say the words, though. She didn’t cry. He took her hands; she could see it in his eyes that he knew what everything meant—that it was over now.

  “Don’t stay here long, Carrie. Go right after I do.”

  “I will.”

  His smile twisted inside her. “See you soon.”

  She nodded.

  His last kiss was soft, and afterward he didn’t look in her eyes. He was trying not to make it feel like good-bye. He got off the bed, went to his wardrobe for something—she didn’t know what, she couldn’t look at him either. A moment later she thought he said, “See you” again, but when she glanced up he was gone. His fast footsteps faded. It seemed to Carrie that one of them ought to say it. So, into the gray dawn silence, she whispered, “Good-bye.”

  No smoke from the chimney. That was a good sign. If Artemis was here, he’d have lit the stove by now to heat up his coffee. And it was barely full l
ight, but there was no lamp burning—another good omen. He wasn’t here. She’d told Ty he wouldn’t be, and now she was looking at the proof. Odd, then, that she couldn’t shake this skittery, uneasy feeling inside. Even if he was here, and still asleep because he’d never stopped drinking, she was safe. He wouldn’t wake, and if he did, she could simply outrun him. There wasn’t a single sensible reason for this peculiar prickly fear. She told herself that several times, standing in the quiet yard. But it didn’t help.

  The sun hadn’t burned through the morning haze, and fog still swirled like ghosts on the ground. Towhees were scratching in the underbrush; nearby a woodpecker drummed. The spiderwort under the window needed watering, and the dayflowers needed thinning again. But Carrie wouldn’t be staying long enough for that. More than likely she’d never live here again. Would she have to close her hospital? Yes, probably—but maybe she could move it somewhere else, someplace closer to her new home. Wherever that might be.

  With a silent, fog-muffled step, she moved to the porch. The door wasn’t closed tight, she saw—it stood about two inches ajar. A strong shock of fear gripped her then; she came close to turning around and running. But she steadied herself by will power and made her legs stand still. Don’t be foolish, it doesn’t mean anything, her mind scolded. He’s not sitting inside cleaning his gun, waiting for you.

  Oh God!—the image of it had her ready to bolt again. What if he is?

  He’s not. This is your house, too, you can go in and get your own belongings. Anyway, he’s not here. How can you let your fear of him keep you from going into your own house?

  She put her hand on the door and pushed it slowly open. The room was empty, but the sight of the flattened table and all the debris around it shocked her … again, calling back the sickening memory of how it had gotten that way. She hung on hard to the doorknob, needing its stability, and stepped inside.

  She noticed the rank smell and the buzzing of flies at the same instant, and in the next she saw the muddy shoe. On the floor behind the door, preventing it from opening any farther. She jumped back, too panicked to scream, expecting anything.