Charlotte’s Story

by Benedict, Laura

  He smiled. Before he rose from his chair, there was a second’s hesitation and I heard the faint ring of a bell in the kitchen. He had rung for Terrance by pressing the bell beneath the carpet with his foot.

  “Don’t get up.” But I was too late. Press was out of his chair, taking long, quick strides to reach me.

  I took a tiny step backwards, unprepared for the sheer gravity of his presence, the air of Floris and the outdoors about him. He wasn’t deterred, and inwardly I cringed in advance of his touch. But instead of folding me in his arms as I feared he might, he merely put one arm around my shoulders and guided me to my chair.

  “Have you had your coffee, my love?”

  As though to answer for me, Terrance came through the kitchen door carrying a cup and saucer, sugar bowl, and creamer on a tray. Press took his coffee black.

  I murmured a thank you to Terrance, who poured my coffee and refilled Press’s. He went back to the kitchen.

  “Guess who was awake when I looked in on him at 5:15 this morning?”

  “Was he?”

  “Hard at work, trying to get himself out of the crib.”

  “Where was Nonie? Did you take him out?”

  Press looked briefly hurt as though I thought he couldn’t be trusted with Michael on his own. He wasn’t far wrong. But he didn’t bristle.

  “Nonie was right behind me.” He smiled. “That woman has ears like a bat.”

  I stirred two lumps of sugar into my coffee.

  “That’s her job.”

  Press seemed eager—too eager—to be helpful or, perhaps, kind. If noticing Eva’s things caused a knot in my chest, Press’s presence was tightening it. I knew my discomfort with him wasn’t necessarily rational, but I still wondered if I would ever feel differently.

  My eyes rested on the door whose missing panels of glass Terrance had temporarily replaced with tight-fitting squares of wood. Press followed my eyes, saw where I was looking.

  “Terrance is arranging a repair. Marlene tells me we had some nasty wind yesterday. Did you hear it?”

  So Marlene hadn’t mentioned that I’d been in the room.

  “Oh, my. What a shame.” Not a lie. Not quite.

  Marlene and I both knew that there hadn’t been any kind of wind. After the door flew open, the air had remained completely still, and the door rested, motionless, against the chair it had hit. We’d stared at the broken glass glistening on the floor, stunned. As we watched, a dowdy moth the color of parchment careened in from the garden as though blinded by the sunlight, and landed on one of the larger shards of glass. All was silent, so I clearly heard Marlene draw a sharp, startled breath. After a moment, the moth stacked its wings on its back so that it looked like a tiny chunk of wood, and didn’t move again.

  Marlene’s face had undergone a swift change, from surprise to purposefulness.

  “I’ll clean this up.” Then she disappeared into the kitchen, presumably to get a broom and dustpan.

  We would never speak of it to each other.

  To Press, I said the first word that came into my mind: “October.” As though that were all the explanation anyone needed for door panes shattering, Press nodded and closed his book. A Handbook of Acting by Madame Eva Alberti was written in faded gold on the red cover. Eva. The writer’s name caught me short. Was Press reading it where I could see it just to be cruel? No, it wasn’t possible. I looked away. Surely I was being too sensitive.

  Terrance returned with a soft-boiled egg in a china cup and a piece of buttered toast on a Minton porcelain plate decorated with dragons and birds. Usually the sight of the beautifully painted design pleased me, but I could only think of how fascinated Eva had been with them.

  “You’re going to work today?”

  Press cleared his throat, giving me the impression he was about to say something he thought was important.

  “Yes, but first I’m driving into Lynchburg.”

  Lynchburg was the nearest city to Old Gate, though we often found ourselves going up to Charlottesville if we needed to shop for something unusual. Maybe the prejudice was because we frequented The Grange, the resort hotel just outside Charlottesville. Lynchburg seemed a rougher place to me than Charlottesville, even though both were historic university towns. Press often teased me that I was prejudiced because I was from the eastern part of the state.

  “The crematory has Zion and Helen’s ashes ready. Someone needs to pick them up.”

  “Can’t they just send them?”

  He smiled, a look of mock incredulity on his suntanned face. “You’re not suggesting they put Zion and Helen in the mail, are you? I can’t see Helen standing for that.”

  “I meant by car. Delivery.” I felt myself redden. “Why do you have to go?”

  He put his hand over mine, and I surprised myself by not immediately pulling away.

  “I shouldn’t have brought it up. Have I upset you?”

  So much death.

  “There’s no family? Wasn’t there a nephew? I thought I remembered Helen mentioning one.” Zion and Helen were committed atheists who had directed—in the will that Press had made up for them—that they be immediately cremated after death, without interment. There had been no funeral.

  “We wrote to him at the address in Helen’s address book, but we never got an answer.”

  We. I wasn’t sure whom he meant, but I guessed it was Rachel and Jack or maybe some of the others in the group. I didn’t want to think about Zion and Helen anymore.

  “How is Rachel?”

  After asking, I took a bite of toast that was rich with melted butter from the dairy that delivered to us every weekday, but it felt oily and unpleasant in my mouth. No food tasted good to me, and I thought it might never again. I returned the toast to the plate and sipped my coffee to wash away the feel of it.

  “She’s distressed. Still upset about Helen. And Zion, of course. Why don’t you go and see her? The baby’s weighing her down. She says she can hardly sit for five minutes.”

  “I remember feeling like that with Michael.”

  “You stood through dinner three nights in a row. I thought we were going to have to build you your own special table that reached up to here.” He held one hand about a foot over the table. “Remember how Eva. . . .” He stopped.

  He was about to say that Eva had wanted to stand to eat, too.

  She’d been fine in her own chair the first two evenings that I’d had to stand as we ate in the dining room, but on the third evening she began to rock her entire little body as though she would topple the little seat off the chair.

  “Mommy! I want to eat with you.”

  I was already horribly uncomfortable and self-conscious. The baby—Michael—had dropped several inches inside me, yet had one foot pressing hard against my upper ribcage. It was painful and I felt as though I might burst with the pressure. Olivia had suggested that I might be more comfortable if Terrance brought a tray to my room, and that Press could even join me if I liked. But the truth was that I could barely sit at all. And though I’d persuaded Nonie to leave Richmond, where she was living with her sister, she hadn’t yet arrived. I wanted to stay at the table to look after Eva, and I wondered silently if Olivia thought Terrance could do that as well. (Eva chattered frequently at Terrance, who was always polite in response. But she never made him smile. Nothing made Terrance smile.)

  “Stop, Eva.” Resting a hand on one side of the seat, I held on to her with the other. “You need to sit still.” She had gotten food in her hair and all down one side of her face, something she hadn’t done in many months.

  “Unnnnnnhhhhh, no!” Arching her back, she lifted her face to the ceiling and gave the seat another jerk so that she almost forced it, as well as the chair it sat on, over backwards. But I caught it as it tipped. When I tried to resettle her in her seat, making sure the strap affixed to it was secure, she hit at me with the flat of her tiny rounded palm.

  Reflexively I fell back. Even though she was two and a half, she had never
been one to throw tantrums. And she’d never hit anyone. She opened her mouth, yelling, and I glanced over at Press. He shrugged.

  At the head of the table, Olivia, who had never once interfered in our raising of Eva, pushed back her chair and got up. Crossing the few feet of Oriental carpet between us, she stood over Eva, not saying a word. Press and I stared. Eva’s cry faltered.

  I opened my mouth to speak, then closed it.

  Olivia rested a hand on Eva’s now-damp forehead. Eva stared up at the only grandmother she would ever know. She hiccuped.

  “Oh, for heaven’s sake.” Olivia pulled back the chair and picked off the stray peas that had fallen into Eva’s lap from her plate. Then she undid the strap I’d just tightened and lifted her granddaughter, not seeming to mind that the rice decorating Eva’s pinafore would surely transfer to her own beige silk blouse and oxblood tweed skirt.

  “The poor child has a fever, Charlotte. Look how she’s rubbing her ear. She probably has an infection.”

  “No. She can’t. I’m sure she’s getting too old.”

  Eva laid her head on Olivia’s shoulder. She put her thumb in her mouth and whimpered discontentedly. I could see now that her eyes were glazed. I was already feeling like I was betraying her by bringing a new baby into our little family, and here I hadn’t even noticed that she was sick.

  Now, Press stood up. “Let me take her, Mother.”

  “No, I will.” I held open my arms. “I’ll take her upstairs.”

  Olivia shook her head. Terrance had appeared silently a few feet behind her, but she seemed to know he was there. (That Olivia had Terrance there in the house at all was a strange and remarkable thing. But I did not know that then, and still wonder how she had tolerated him.)

  “Bring some warm, wet cloths to the nursery, Terrance. Also get the medicine dropper and mineral oil from my bathroom. And pour a cognac.” There was a hint of a smile at the corners of her mouth, and in her hazel eyes. “That’s for me,” she said. “Finish your dinners.”

  As she left the room, Eva waved a limp good-bye with a hand slung over her grandmother’s shoulder.

  I was too tired, too surprised to argue or go after them. Later, I peeked into the nursery to see Olivia sitting in the rocking chair with Eva cuddled against her and sucking her thumb as Olivia read her a story. Leaving quietly before Eva could spot me, I heard Olivia’s pleasant voice behind me, reading the tale of Hansel and Gretel and the evil witch who lived in the gingerbread house.

  Michael was born within twenty-four hours, and Nonie arrived at the house the next day.

  “I miss her.” Press squeezed my hand. “You know how much I miss her, Charlotte. How can you not know?”

  But we let her die. I wanted to scream the words, but I wasn’t going to cause a scene. Still, I wouldn’t comfort him. He would have to find his own comfort if that’s what he was really looking for. I changed the subject.

  “You’re going to the office when you get back from Lynchburg?” In truth, I didn’t care what time he came home. I wanted Bliss House to myself—Marlene, Terrance, Nonie, and Michael notwithstanding.

  His thick brows came together almost imperceptibly. I wasn’t going to make forgiveness easy, if I forgave him at all.

  “Wills,” he said. “Two new ones on my desk.”

  It took our child’s death to remind their owners, I thought. How appropriate. If the same thought occurred to him, he didn’t say.

  He lifted my hand to his lips and kissed the palm of it tenderly, the way he had often done when we were first married. “I won’t be late tonight. What will you do today?”

  I knew I should go and see Rachel. She hadn’t done anything wrong, and had even called the house sometime during the past weeks. But I wasn’t in the mood to talk to her. I loved Rachel, but she required a lot of attention and energy, and I had always been one to give it. Both were in limited supply for me that day.

  Without much of a plan, I had dressed in comfortable slacks and a navy blue cardigan. I had even put on a light coat of lipstick and a dash of mascara to give an impression of some kind of normality. It wasn’t that I was lying about the way I was feeling. Not really. I only wanted to be functional. A part of me was still in my bed upstairs, unable to move. To breathe. But there was nothing I could learn by staying there. Nothing would ever change—or at least nothing would change in the way I needed it to.

  “I may start going through your mother’s things.” I didn’t mention that I had almost begun the day before, and really hadn’t known that’s what I was going to do until I said it. But as I did, I knew it was right.

  Chapter 7

  Olivia’s Room

  Press had tried to encourage me. “Have some fun. Pretend it’s a treasure hunt.”

  Nothing in my life had felt less like a treasure hunt.

  Before approaching Olivia’s room (was I procrastinating?), I went to the nursery and found Michael sleeping on Eva’s trundle bed, breathing heavily. Nonie led me out of the room, whispering that she’d found him awake and with Preston in the room just before dawn, but he’d gone back to sleep.

  “Press didn’t wake him,” I said automatically. “He found him trying to get out of his crib.”

  Nonie didn’t respond, but went on as though I hadn’t spoken.

  “We rocked in the chair for a while, and he just climbed right down and went over there.” She gestured to Eva’s bed. “The poor thing closed his eyes and went right back to sleep.”

  I had to look away so Nonie wouldn’t see the tears in my eyes.

  Grief comes to people in different ways. Even children.

  Michael had few real words, yet, but nearly every day since she died he’d searched all around the nursery and wherever else he was in the house for Eva. I wondered how long it would be before he got used to her not being there. The few weeks she’d been gone were like a lifetime for a one-year-old.

  “Let him sleep as long as he wants.”

  Nonie gave a small sigh that told me she disagreed. She had kept both Eva and Michael on a strict schedule. But if anything justified a break in the schedule, it was Michael’s need for his sister.

  I kissed her on the cheek. She was so dear to me, and she’d loved both of my children. “He might be getting sick. I’ll listen for him if you want to go down and get some breakfast.”

  She looked skeptical, but it was all I had to offer her. It didn’t occur to me then to speculate about what might have awakened him. It was much later, when he was five years old, that his night terrors began. As we went out, I left the nursery door open halfway so I might hear him when he woke.

  I hadn’t spent much time in Olivia’s room when she was alive, and now, when all her things belonged to me, I felt like an intruder. Beginning a few days after her death, I’d told Marlene and Terrance to keep the door to her bedroom closed. Seeing the door open had chilled me every time I came out of my own bedroom and looked across the gallery.

  Olivia’s was an oddly Victorian room, cluttered and crowded compared to the rest of the house, which was full of antiques and precious things but had more of a sense of air and light to it.

  Even the wallpaper was dense with cherry blossoms, and for the first time I made the connection between it and the hand-painted cherry trees on the wallpaper of the ballroom on the third floor. That motif was Oriental, with repeated images of an old man and a beautiful Japanese girl. But like the theater, the ballroom was rarely used—not even for Olivia’s annual New Year’s Eve party. “Wasted space,” was how she had referred to it. “And the devil to heat in the winter.” (I envisioned it as something more than wasted space. I imagined transforming it into a big, friendly winter playroom where the children could run around on snowy days; but that idea, of course, had been put on hold. I hadn’t even mentioned it to Press.)

  The last time I’d been in the bedroom was with Marlene, to retrieve the brooch and necklace that Olivia had left to her.

  I found that I couldn’t look directly at Olivia
’s massive four-poster, canopied bed—the bed she had died in—though it stayed in my field of vision wherever I went in the room. Press had asked a few weeks earlier if I wanted Olivia’s room for myself; or if not, did I think Eva would like it. It was the largest bedroom in the house, with a beautiful view of the rose garden and the hills beyond. Perhaps I was superstitious, but I told him I would never sleep in it, and that it was too big a room for a little girl. No matter how we changed it, it would always be Olivia’s room to me.

  But that morning I was glad to be surrounded by Olivia’s things. I got to work—well, not really work, though I was pretending even to myself that I was there to start cleaning things out. What I wanted was to be close to Olivia, to let her know I was listening, even though the idea of actually communicating with her frightened me, and the sense of her presence I’d had on the day of the funeral had faded. If it hadn’t been for the broken glass in the dining room, I wondered if I would have continued to imagine that she might help me at all.

  Because of our difference in size (and also because the idea of wearing her things seemed macabre and strange to me), I had no use for the rows of shoes and clothes in the tall French armoire and closet. Olivia’s tweed luncheon suits, day dresses, and cocktail dresses were plentiful and expensive, but not gaudy. At least ten evening gowns had been hung in the closet, carefully shrouded in linen bags, along with a mink coat and a number of fox, ocelot, and mink pieces. There were several pairs of wool pants I’d seen her in on the coldest days if she was staying home, and a single pair of worn dungarees. Olivia administered the orchards, and knew plenty about cultivation and horticulture, but she managed to run the farm in sensible shoes and slacks or tweed skirts. Unlike Press and me, she didn’t ride. I’d always wondered about that, but she appeared not to care about horses at all.

  Her bathroom was neat as a pin. For a woman in her fifties, she had remarkably few unguents and perfumes. It might have been the bathroom of a particularly tidy guest. In all the years I’d lived with Olivia, I had only been in her bathroom twice, to get aspirin. In fact, I’d never really known Olivia to have a bodily function beyond a sneeze or cough until just before she died. Press had told me he’d never once heard her break wind, or seen her rinse her mouth when she brushed her teeth. Everything was done in the privacy of her room or bathroom. Olivia once overheard him joke that moments after he’d shot out of her fully clothed body, she’d bathed, changed, and had Terrance bring her a cocktail before the doctor even arrived for his delivery. Instead of getting angry or embarrassed, Olivia had just shaken her head and told him that, no, he’d been born at eight in the morning, and she never had cocktails before five in the afternoon.