Charlotte’s Story

by Benedict, Laura

  Eva had suffered. Was she still suffering? I only knew that I hadn’t been there when she had needed me most. I had compromised the bond between us. I had failed her, and I was desperate for her to forgive me. I wanted another chance.

  Wrapping the blanket more tightly around me, I brushed the frost from the seat of the upholstered chair Terrance had moved in front of the makeshift screen earlier in the day, and sat down with my legs tucked under me for warmth. I didn’t speculate on why it was so cold, remembering the cold draft where Olivia had stood in the dining room. If it was cold, I reasoned, Olivia was near.

  Chapter 13

  Olivia Revealed

  She was there, of course, on the screen. Waiting for me.

  This was a younger Olivia than the one in the photo in her room or the portrait in the salon. A girl I might have shared secrets with at Burton Hall, or sat next to on the bus going downtown, our white-gloved hands folded on our laps. A teenaged Olivia, her smooth blond hair parted in the exact center of her head, and two braids twisted into tight spirals that covered her ears. She wore a simple green linen shirtwaist and a familiar look of unwavering confidence. A challenge in her eyes and the open curves of her brows—one of which was ever so slightly lifted. How will you explain yourself to me? Why should I be interested? Seated, her right elbow rested casually on the chair’s arm, one of her two long necklaces caught up to dangle from her fingers. It was a perfect picture, except for the angry scar from an accident that she’d had as a child above her right brow.

  It surely wasn’t possible, but she leaned forward a few inches and beckoned to me. I breathed in sharply.

  Watch, Charlotte. Listen.

  Olivia’s voice, low and relaxed—the same voice she used when reading Eva a story—but coming from far, far away so that I also had to lean forward to hear.

  I feared I had gone mad, or might be dreaming, but the cold told me otherwise.

  The necklaces dropped from her slender fingers, and she held out her hand.

  You must know, Charlotte.

  Yes, now I was terribly afraid—not of Olivia herself, but of the fact of what was happening. She was reaching out to me. Did I dare? I rose from the chair, careful not to trip on the blanket. She waited, her hazel eyes more patient than I’d ever known them to be in life. In life. Surely this was life too. Her presence was warm. Surreal. Perfect.

  I barely felt the cold on my feet as I crossed the few feet of carpet to where she waited. I reached for her hand.

  It is my betrothal day. Me, Olivia. I can hardly believe it.

  My father has not spoken to me for four days, and my mother won’t stop talking. I steal a glance at her as she tries to flirt with the attractive dark-eyed boy sitting across from us who looks like he has been kept in a broom closet his entire life, and I want to beg her to be quiet because she sounds like a fool. Look at the boy, Michael Searle Bliss: Did you ever see a boy who was so polite and neat? He’s kind to my mother, but I wonder if he isn’t patronizing her. Being patronized is the thing she likes best, aside from a coconut blancmange. It makes me want to scream, but she has made her way in the world by pretending to let others advise her while making sure that she gets exactly what she wants. What she wants now is for me to be married and away from the house.

  My father and his anger simmer beside me. His fingers grip the knees of his brown wool pants so tightly that his knuckles are white. The lawyer—who, like the tall ugly man with moles on his face and neck, arrived wearing an old-fashioned Homburg even though it’s nearly eighty degrees outside—keeps trying to engage him in conversation from where he stands behind Michael Searle’s chair. You would think by now that the man would understand that my mother is in charge in this matter.

  I’ve never been alone with Michael Searle Bliss, who is always called by both his first and middle names. He has written me letters—long, rather interesting letters telling me about Virginia and the town of Old Gate, where he lives with his mother, Lucy. Although he is only a year younger than I, the letters are as enthusiastic as if they’d been written by a child. When these letters come, my mother reads them first, but I do not care just as I don’t care whom I marry anymore.

  There is money enough for me to live on when my parents are dead, but my mother is determined that I should marry. Although I won’t complain, as it is the only way I won’t have to listen to her constant harping about my stubbornness, my posture, my table manners, anymore. I have only the vaguest idea of how she settled on Michael Searle. It had something to do with our mothers being very distant cousins. Why this rich boy would have any interest in a scarred girl who cares more about accounting for her father’s acreage and livestock than throwing parties or running a house, I’m sure I don’t know.

  But it is why my father is angry. He imagined I would act as the son he never had, taking over the management of his land when he got too old. My father is an abrasive man. He alienated the only other suitor I ever had, calling his Irish family “mackerel-eating papists” during a dinner at which he drank too much wine. Though I suspected he wasn’t really as drunk as he pretended. If he were kinder, and my mother less ambitious, I might have stayed with them forever.

  I know I should listen to what they’re saying. I hear my name, though no one talks to me directly. But the room is hot and I dislike the way the tall, ugly man stares at a point just above my head, as though I am invisible.

  There are parties to celebrate our upcoming wedding. More of them are in Raleigh than in Virginia because Michael’s mother is still in mourning and is, anyway, rather reclusive. Michael Searle and I smile dimly through them while my mother comments behind her hand about the quality of the wine being served. Many people’s stockpiles put by before the Volstead Act are running low, and so the quality is uneven. She embarrasses me, and I try to keep her away from Michael Searle. I’ve become protective of him, somehow, as though he were a younger brother rather than my betrothed. The parties are a torment. He is a dreadful dancer, and so we sit watching the others. He urges me on, encouraging me to dance with the other young men who politely ask, but I become sad for him when I see him sitting, alone, wearing his mourning armband and smoking cigarette after cigarette. I wonder that he doesn’t have any friends. Of course, so many of the young men our age went off to war and died. Perhaps his friends have all died. I do not ask.

  At the parties, regardless of the quality of the wine (or gin or bourbon), everyone drinks heavily. Nothing so coarse as bathtub gin—though I have been to hidden roadside taverns, much to the chagrin of my father and the shame of my mother. Michael Searle and I have a fondness for champagne. I think, sometimes, that I would like to drink champagne until I drown in it.

  Three weeks before the wedding, Michael’s mother disappears from Bliss House, and her body is found deep in the woods. When Michael calls to tell me, I try to convince him that my mother and I should come up to help him and be with him. But he tells me it’s better that I don’t. When I do see him, there is a new sadness in his eyes and he tells me that he has found morphine in her room, that everyone thinks she died of a heart attack, but he fears she was an addict. It’s deeply shocking, and I cannot reconcile his words with the kind woman who had already welcomed me as a daughter and pressed several pieces of her elegant jewelry on me. I have heard of people becoming slaves to morphine and opium, but I have never known anyone personally. My father wants to call off the wedding because her death is a bad omen, but my mother says that I must decide. I tell her that there is no reason at all that I shouldn’t marry Michael Searle, though I’m not sure if I am marrying him because I care about him, or because I pity him.

  The wedding is my mother’s day. Her triumph is twofold: that, at twenty-four, I am still a virgin; and I will marry into great wealth. My bosom friend from childhood, Margaret, who is lately married herself, has tears in her eyes as I hand my fragrant sweet pea and rose bouquet to her to hold at the altar.

  Michael Searle finally comes to me our first night on
the SS Leviathan. On the train, and at the hotel in New York, we had separate rooms. I didn’t understand, and was too shy to ask why. My less-than-demonstrative parents have always shared a bedroom, a bed. I’m not naïve. I raised rabbits to sell for meat. I have seen cows and bulls in the fields. My dearest Margaret told me what happened on her wedding night, how she’d been alarmed at first, but then was happy. So very happy.

  I fear I will never have children.

  He asks me at dinner if he can come to my cabin. We wear our traveling clothes, still, as is the custom for the first night of a voyage. My costume is from Paris, a gift from Michael Searle’s mother, who was so much more stylish than my own mother. I wear the peacock brooch she gave me as well. Very precious. Very expensive. I think it impressed my mother, as so many things about the Bliss family do.

  We sit side by side on the banquette, looking out at the room at all the guests. I scorn my mother because of her affection for rich things, but I am dazzled by the long ropes of pearls, the beauty of the women, so many so daring in their very short dresses. I have finally bobbed my hair, against my father’s wishes. But I am a married woman and I have left his house forever.

  Michael Searle touches my hand beneath the table. He has kissed me more than once. Timid but lovely kisses that, indeed, rouse something in me even though I don’t swoon when I see him, as dear Margaret tells me she does whenever she has been separated from her Roger for more than a day. When Michael Searle slides his hand onto my thigh beneath the table, I reach for it, scandalized but thrilled, and I find it trembling beneath mine. “May I come to your cabin tonight?” he whispers. “Please?” His breath hints of the bourbon he’s poured into our Coca-Colas from his flask (the ship is dry, and we have both bourbon and wine hidden in our trunks) and cigarette smoke, which by no means repels me. I am a secret smoker like so many of my friends. He didn’t know it about me until I asked him for a cigarette on the train. We are strangers in so many ways.

  Michael Searle is shy and kind. He never bullies or shames me. Is it any wonder that I was happy to leave my father’s house, even to enter some other form of bondage?

  Each of the preceding nights, I’d put on the delicate ivory silk nightgown and feather-trimmed robe my mother bought for my trousseau. Waiting. Eventually I fell asleep, to awaken to a faint knock on my door from the train matron or the hotel maid, suggesting breakfast. This night, I have sprinkled it with a bit of the precious Chanel No. 5 Michael Searle gave me for my birthday.

  Now that it will happen, I am nervous. My stomach and my head feel light, as though I haven’t eaten dinner at all. When the light tap comes on the door, I startle.

  Michael Searle is calmer, much less agitated than he was at dinner. And also, like me, perhaps a little drunk. We sit on the tiny sofa beneath the porthole and drink wine, talking about the dinner, the music, what we will do when we get to England and Paris. The Great War has been over for several years, but neither of us has been to Europe and we aren’t sure what to expect.

  Finally, the pauses between our words, our sentences, become longer. I am relaxed and begin to feel myself flag. I want something to happen. The thing that made Margaret giggle as we sat in the Hotel Baltimore in Raleigh, having tea at the table near the fountain.

  The single lamp beside the bed suddenly dims, startling us both, and we laugh. Michael Searle gets up and turns it off. I can see him in shadow. I am no longer so nervous.

  “Olivia.” His voice is a whisper, but I hear sadness in it. “I’ll try to make you happy. Forgive me if I can’t. Will you forgive me?”

  I don’t know how to answer. I have never thought too much of being happy. After my accident, I became used to being pointed at and whispered about. I became brave and aloof instead of frightened in the face of unpleasantness. Thank God for dear Margaret! She sees beyond my face. My bravado. But the house—Bliss House—that is now ours together frightens me. On my visits, Michael Searle showed me all of it, from the servants’ rooms to the places he’d hidden to play as a lonely little boy (How could he be otherwise? He had few friends, he told me.) to the roof with its magnificent view and strange collection of tiny shacks. At night, lying alone in one of the bedrooms near the back stairs, I heard sobbing and laughter and footsteps coming from the third floor when everyone else was asleep and there were no other guests besides my mother. She heard nothing, and so the sounds must not exist. They must not matter.

  “We have to choose to be happy, Olivia. You know it as well as I.”

  I choose to trust him.

  I have never been naked in front of a man before, and my mother has hinted that it isn’t necessary if I don’t want it to be that way. But the wine makes me bold, and although he looks politely away, I notice a small tremble on his lips that I can see even in shadow. I take off my robe and untie the front of my gown so that it hangs open, partially exposing my breasts.

  Michael lays his blue velvet smoking jacket over the back of the chair. I am surprised to see that beneath it, he wears a long old-fashioned nightshirt tucked into his pants. But who am I to judge? I know so little about men.

  Margaret has told me enough that I believe my mother wrong—that I should not simply bear what will happen to me, and that I should touch him in ways similar to the ways in which he touches me. He is tender enough, lightly pushing my gown away so that it falls from me. Kissing my shoulder, the crook of my elbow, my wrist. Approaching me gently. Kissing me deeply, bringing more than a flutter of a response to my body.

  How does he know what to do? I had taken his trembling for fear. But had it been desire? Anticipation?

  He helps me onto the bed. We can feel the vibration of the ship, hear the constant hum of the engines. He lies atop me but not so that he puts his full weight on me, and takes my face in his hands. He wears no scent but smells faintly of perspiration and the ship’s lavender soap. We’ve never spoken of my scar. Sometimes, in fact, I even forget that it is there. Now he puts his lips to it and I feel his breath on my face. No man, not even the young Irish boy who cared for me, had ever kissed that most tender place. Something inside me breaks: the embarrassment, the fear, the years of my mother looking hopefully at my male friends, praying that one might take pity on me and marry me. It wasn’t that I believed I was ugly or unlovable. It was the sense that I had disappointed. Always disappointed. It almost made me bitter.

  Almost.

  Each night of the crossing, and in England, before we arrive in Paris, he comes to me. Touches me. His lips on my face, my breasts. His hands running over my body, searching. Searing me. Causing me to put my hand to my mouth so the others on our corridor won’t hear.

  But he never removes his nightshirt, and he gently pushes my hands away or stops me with a kiss when I try to do it for him.

  “Wait,” he says. “Soon.”

  I wait. I want to write to Margaret to ask her what to do, but the post would take too long. By the time a letter reaches her we will be leaving Paris. Waiting is all I can do.

  Before another ship returns us to New York a month later, I am in love with this gentle man who makes me laugh and makes me wait. I find myself looking for his face if we are separated in a crowd, or if I leave my room to go down to breakfast before he has left his room. He knows so much. His dark eyes are intelligent and he knows the histories of so many of the pieces of art we see, he knows the cities from studying maps in books, he talks of the places where we will travel later. He knows all about the war, and tells me Germany will never, ever truly give up.

  I love him. I trust him.

  God forgive him.

  The brief, damp touch of a small hand on my face woke me. I opened my eyes in startlingly bright sunlight to find Eva standing beside me. She looked as pitiful as I had ever seen her, her eyes and face drooping with exhaustion. And she was wet. Her pink cotton playsuit clung to her achingly thin body, exposing the outline of her delicate ribs. Droplets of water emerged from her clinging curls before gathering into rivulets and running into t
he gray hollows of her cheeks. She wore the same blue velvet ribbon in her hair that I’d seen in my dream, but now it was limp and hung loosely. I tried to reach for her, to smooth the water off of her face, but my arms felt stiff as though invisibly bound and I sobbed in frustration, fearful that she would go away before I could hold her again.

  “Eva, baby.”

  But she was backing away from me, carefully, placing one dirty white sandal behind the other as though following some invisible line.

  “No, stay!”

  My arms and legs wouldn’t move when I tried to reach for her. Even my voice felt mired in my throat. When she turned and ran, I was afraid she would collide with the room’s heavy furniture and hurt herself. But of course the dead can’t be hurt.

  Her footsteps echoed in the vast hall as she disappeared.

  Thrashing against whatever was binding me, I finally pulled free, only to fall to the floor.

  Opening my eyes again, I saw that the door to the hallway was shut. I understood that I had probably been dreaming.

  The fall had hurt; I lay on my side, the mohair blanket wound around my body. My mouth was so dry, I could hardly open it. One arm was caught beneath me, and my free hand clutched a limp sprig of goldenrod.

  Disengaging myself from the blanket, I stood up. My bones felt hollow and my muscles ached. Limping from stiffness, I went to the lantern and laid the sprig of goldenrod beside it. The sheet on the wall was blank and dingy gray in the weak morning light.

  I was filled with pity for Olivia. For myself. I rested my fingers on the cold lantern and looked down. My heart seemed to stop for an eternity.