The Secrets She Carried

by Davis, Barbara

  I keep an eye on the clock as I tidy the room, dreading Dr. Shaw’s arrival. When his knock finally comes, I go down to greet him. He removes his hat and offers a smile that doesn’t reach his eyes. He’s brought no bag, I see. There will be no examination, then, only bad news.

  Susanne rises from her dressing table and extends a pale hand as she crosses the room to meet him. Her eyes shift to me. “Leave us, Adele. I’ll call for you when the doctor has finished. And close the door on your way out, please.”

  Susanne is already working at her buttons when Dr. Shaw suggests they sit and talk a bit. There’s a flicker of fear in Susanne’s eyes as they meet mine in the doorway, a moment of dark knowing. I turn away, eager to be gone when Susanne receives the news I know is coming, that her wreck of a body will not abide another pregnancy, that there will be no more babies.

  I have just reached the foyer when the door to Susanne’s room bangs open. “You lie!” Her words screech down the stairs, echoing in the small space at the bottom. “It’s a lie! You’re like all the rest. You don’t want me to have a child!”

  “Mrs. Gavin—”

  “Get out! Get out of my house!”

  The doctor’s voice is louder now, no longer muffled, and I look up to find him backing out into the hall. Susanne is advancing on him, two spots of hot color blazing high on her cheeks. He stops at the head of the stairs, trying again to make her see reason. “Mrs. Gavin, surely you know there has been too much damage. While conception is still technically possible, I would be negligent if I didn’t warn you that another episode like the last one could well prove fatal. Given your age and your…dependencies, a pregnancy is not ever likely to be…successful.”

  But Susanne isn’t listening. She sends him away, fouling the air with a string of words Mama would even now wash my mouth out for using. Dr. Shaw doesn’t look at me as he slips past, just sweeps his hat off the foyer table and slips out.

  She calls for me then, and I go to her. Henry has disappeared into his tobacco fields, leaving me to weather Susanne’s storm alone. She is at her dressing table when I enter, staring hard at her reflection.

  “Am I old?” she asks without turning away from the glass. “You heard what he said, Adele—that I am too old to have a baby. Do you think I am?”

  I have no earthly idea how to answer her. Instead, I reach for her tincture, startled to realize there is a part of me—an awful part—that is relieved by Dr. Shaw’s news, relieved to know there will be no need for Henry to visit his wife’s bed. I have seen her body; it is not beautiful, not young, yet thinking of it, of Henry doing what must be done to produce an heir, flays me raw.

  I wait for the grief to tear through her, for her to dissolve into one of her sticky puddles of self-pity. I steel myself to offer the polite and proper sympathies, to splash a bit of bootleg into her teacup and dose out her tincture. But there are no tears. Instead her eyes go queer and cold in the glass.

  “This is Henry’s fault,” she hisses. “Of course it’s Henry. He’s not man enough to give me a child!”

  I cannot listen. I want to scream, to fly at her like a cat, to shriek what trembles on my tongue, that she has only herself to blame, that her desolate womb is a mirror of her empty heart, that she does not deserve Henry’s child. But I hold my tongue. Losing my place means losing Henry. And I am too far gone for that, whatever comes.

  I feel her eyes on me now, hard but unseeing. She has become a feral thing, wild-eyed and unsteady on her feet, defiance swirling about her like smoke, and for the first time I am afraid. Not of her probing eyes, but of what is in back of them, of the seething, glittering thing I am watching come to life.

  “I’ll show them all! That doctor, and those gloating biddies, even Henry! They think I can’t produce an heir, that I’m not strong enough, not good enough. I’ll prove them wrong if it kills me!”

  I flinch when she says it. I cannot believe that ravaged body of hers could produce a child without killing her. And yet I know she means to try. It’s a strange kind of revelation, and an uneasy one—the thought that she could die. I don’t want that, I tell myself. And it wouldn’t matter. Even if Henry were free, he couldn’t be mine. Not in the way he’s Susanne’s. Not ever that way.

  Chapter 13

  There is no escape from the heat.

  Or from the storm slowly gathering around us. Whether I speak now of Henry, of the need smoldering between us, unspoken and untouched, or of Susanne, with her frantic, reckless schemes, I cannot say. I only know in my bones that the storm is coming and that one way or another I will be caught at its center.

  August is nearly over but the days ooze by like years, endless and thick with a sticky-wet heat that leaves my temper short. But it isn’t only the heat that makes me cranky. From sunup ’til sundown Susanne wears me out with talk of a negro midwife from Level Grove who claims to help women have babies.

  Her bedside table has become a hoard of mysterious bottles and dark vials—tonics of fennel and wild yam, a tea made from liferoot and something called squaw-weed, and a dark, sticky syrup made from berries and bark and other things I’m too squeamish to ask about—all promising to produce a healthy child, and at no small price, I’ll wager.

  The packages come weekly, small parcels wrapped in plain brown paper. Susanne’s been paying those Level Grove boys to bring them with her bootleg because the midwife lives back up in the hills where they set up their stills, and because for a little money they’ll do anything she asks and not tell a breathing soul. They may be no-account, but those boys know how to keep a secret.

  None of it matters, though. Susanne is wasting her money.

  I know this so-called midwife, or women like her. Back home we have them by the handful. Traiteur, we call them, voodoo women selling gris-gris in dark, airless shops to women desperate for love or a quickening womb. I want to tell her there are witchwomen down in the Quarter who will make her the same promise for a tenth of the money this woman is charging, my mother’s kin among them. But my opinions would not be welcome, and so I keep them to myself. Still, it surpasses understanding that a woman who once held herself so high could now pin all her hopes on a colored woman and common superstition. I still shiver when I think of that awful night, so much blood, so much sadness. How, I wonder, could she ever risk another like it? Has she given no thought to what another dead child might do to Henry? These thoughts, too, I keep to myself.

  She is little better than a recluse these days, a specter haunting her bedroom window, lost in the cottony haze of her tincture. Dr. Shaw gave up restricting her refills when she started phoning him at all hours, teary and panicked, claiming she was dying.

  One day when her little brown bottle begins to run low, I am sent to the druggist. My heart turns a little somersault when she tells me Henry’s making a trip to the hardware store and that I’ll be riding with him. Aside from church, I’ve never been anywhere with him.

  We go in the old red truck, the windows rolled down, sucking in hot red dust as we head down the drive. I’ve got on my good blue dress, but I’ve left my hat. It’s too hot. Besides, no one has ever paid me any mind unless I was with Susanne. We’re awkward with each other as we ride, like those early nights in the study when we would both wait for the other to finally break the silence. Like then, I sit with my hands in my lap and look straight ahead.

  My handbag rests on the seat between us, Susanne’s small bottle tucked inside. I wonder if Henry knows what I’m after downtown, or if he even cares. Or if he knows about Minnie Maw, and the peculiar collection of bottles beside his wife’s bed. There is a part of me that wants to know but another part that would rather not think of Henry’s role in Susanne’s scheme to produce a child, and so I sit quietly, listening to the cough and grind of that old truck, thinking how good it is to be there beside him on those torn seats with the dust blowing in, thinking, too, that I wouldn’t mind if I was never anywhere else. I’m almost disappointed when we finally pull into Meeting Street.
/>   “Where should I drop you?”

  After the silence of the ride, his voice is almost startling. I gather my bag and reach for the door handle. “This is fine,” I say, though we’re in front of the barber rather than the druggist. “I won’t be long.”

  When he lays a hand on my arm I start, then steal a glance at the men loitering outside the barbershop. Henry seems not to notice. “Have you got—” He breaks off, clears his throat. “Do you have any money?”

  Before I can answer, he reaches into his pocket, pulls out several neatly folded bills, and lays them on the seat next to me. I stare at them a minute, and then my cheeks go hot. He doesn’t mean the money for the druggist. He means it for me. I fumble for words, but my tongue is pasted to the roof of my mouth all of a sudden, and in my head I can hear Mama lecturing me about the kinds of girls who take money from men. I turn my eyes from the neatly folded bills and reach for the door handle.

  He touches my hand, but I pull away. There are too many eyes on us, curious eyes unaccustomed to seeing Henry Gavin with a young woman. But Henry doesn’t notice the eyes. His gaze is fixed straight ahead, his work-roughened hands tight on the steering wheel.

  “I’m sorry,” he says, the words thick and awkward. “I wanted to give you…I wanted to show you…”

  He doesn’t finish. He doesn’t have to. His eyes tell the rest, soft as they lock with mine, and in that instant the last threads of pretense unravel. My belly clenches tight, a thousand wings all taking flight at once, so that I can barely breathe.

  “You have,” I whisper, my throat suddenly thick. “Now, put your money away.”

  I’m almost dizzy as I step out of the truck and set off down the sidewalk, my eyes carefully lowered as I thread my way through the clutch of men outside the barbershop. There are five, maybe six, and I’m pretty sure I recognize two of them from church. Their heads come up one at a time over their newspapers as I pass, like bulls at a fence. Long after I’ve cleared the herd, I can still feel their eyes. Then I hear Henry’s name and a boisterous gust of laughter.

  There’s nothing I want in the window of Redding’s dress shop, or at least nothing I can afford, but I linger just the same, pretending to browse so I can hear what the men are saying about Henry. More nasty talk about hiring coloreds, I expect. But that’s not it at all.

  “Leave it to Gavin,” the tallest of the bunch is saying. “To look at the man you’d swear he never had an itch in his life, and all the while he’s been hiding that ripe little peach right down the hall from his wife.”

  There’s another round of snorts and guffaws and more chatter I can barely make out, but it’s enough to make my cheeks go hot and my stomach queasy.

  “She’d better damn well be worth it,” answers a paunchy man in a too-tight suit. His snicker makes my skin crawl. “Henry Gavin’s got a lot to lose, and he’ll lose it for sure if he gets caught with his hand in the fruit bowl. The girl’ll get the boot, but Henry, well, he’d best watch his step is all. Can’t say I blame the man, though. She’s one sweet little piece, and it can’t be much fun crawling under the sheets with that dried-up old scarecrow of a wife.”

  My mind seethes with protests to hurl back at them—that it’s all a pack of foul lies, that there’s nothing improper going on—but doing so would only draw attention, when all I want is to melt into the sidewalk.

  Henry Gavin’s got a lot to lose.

  The words leave me clammy and trembling all over, so flummoxed I barely notice when the little shop bell tinkles and Celia Cunningham is suddenly standing in front of me. There’s a flicker of surprise on her heavily rouged face, a quick darting of eyes beneath the brim of her clever yellow hat.

  “Good afternoon…Adele, isn’t it? Is Mrs. Gavin not with you?”

  I shake my head, peering over her shoulder, praying to God the men have finished their filthy talk. I want only to be gone, to take care of my business and get home, to sit with what I’ve heard and decide whether to tell Henry what folks are saying about him. About us.

  “I’m only in town to run an errand,” I say thickly, and try to move past. But Mrs. Cunningham’s feeling chatty today, or nosy, more like.

  “I do hope she’s well? I paid her a call a while back, you know, but she wasn’t feeling well enough to see me, poor thing. Such a pity, another baby lost.” She forms a pout with her bright red mouth, then arches one penciled brow. “And surely the last?”

  I cannot help it; my hackles rise. I hold no ties with Susanne Gavin, nor she with me, beyond my tiny wage, but I will never forget the things Celia Cunningham said about Henry that day in the parlor. I stick out my chin and look her dead in the eye.

  “I can’t speak to that, ma’am. I was taught never to inquire about things that are none of my business.”

  She blinks at me; then her face goes all frosty. “Please tell Susanne that I asked after her.”

  And then she’s gone, heels tapping hard and fast as she moves down the sidewalk toward the barbershop. My heart sinks when I see her grab hold of the snickering man in the too-tight suit and drag him away from his friends. Before they even reach the corner their heads are bent close, and then Celia turns to gape at me. By dinner the talk will be all over town.

  Chapter 14

  Leslie

  Leslie felt lost as she glanced up and down Meeting Street. Nothing looked remotely familiar. The sleepy downtown she remembered was gone, made over into a kind of vintage-chic shopping district. The First National Bank housed a fitness center, Hayden’s Barbershop was now a trendy boutique, and the locksmith had given way to a florist with an icy white wedding cake in the window. The newness was disturbing. Nothing had changed, and everything had. But then, after thirty years, what did she expect?

  She had come on a mission, to buy clothes suitable for life in Gavin. The excursion had actually been Jay’s idea. He thought she needed to work on fitting in, and while he was right—the clothes she’d brought with her were completely wrong—he could have been a little nicer about it.

  “No one in Gavin’s going to be impressed by your Armani suits. In fact, I’m pretty sure if you were to ask most of them, they’d agree that Armani makes a damn fine jar of spaghetti sauce.”

  She’d been so surprised by the remark she nearly let it pass. In the end though, she couldn’t. “That’s a bit harsh, don’t you think?”

  “No, it’s fact. People around here don’t care about that stuff. They don’t care what you wear or what you drive. They care about who you are.”

  “Should I trade in the Beemer for a horse and buggy, then?”

  He hadn’t bothered to smile. “That’s not what I meant, but you have to admit you’re awfully big-city for the folks around here.”

  Big City.

  The nickname had already stuck, and she wasn’t at all sure she liked it. She’d like to believe he was only teasing, but something in his voice and in the hard, square set of his jaw when he said it made her wonder.

  The familiar toll of First Presbyterian’s steeple bells reminded Leslie why she’d come to town and that she didn’t have much time. In two hours she was supposed to meet Jay for lunch, to go over plans for the winery and ideas about how she might contribute. It wasn’t a meeting she was looking forward to. Nor was she convinced that she’d made the right decision in agreeing to stay. But she had agreed, at least for the time being, so she supposed she should get a move on.

  Her heels tapped quick and sharp as she set off down the sidewalk, echoing off the neat brick shop fronts. It felt strange to walk down streets that were quiet and unhurried, where people made eye contact and smiled as they passed. In New York you just kept your head down and got where you were going. Here, no one seemed in a hurry to get anywhere, and why should they be? It was a gorgeous day, sunny and surprisingly mild after a week of crushing heat, the breeze whispering softly of summer’s end. All along Meeting Street shop doors stood open, many windows already dressed for fall, tailor-made for a nice leisurely browse.

/>   Mercifully, it didn’t take long to find what she was after: boot-cut jeans, a few T-shirts, a plain denim jacket, and a pair of blue canvas Toms, all in one surprisingly trendy shop called Lulu’s Closet. As she left the shop with her handful of bags, she still had an hour to kill before she was supposed to meet Jay, plenty of time to explore a few of the artsy shops that had caught her eye.

  There was one in particular that looked interesting—the Poison Moon—whose windows brimmed with candles and crystals and chunky stone jewelry. She’d never gone in for all the chanting and incense, but something about the music spilling through the open door, the sound of ancient civilizations, of druids and spells, lured her inside.

  Despite bare brick walls and the scuffed plank floor, there was an almost otherworldly feel to the place as she stepped inside, a melding of the earthy and the sacred—more like something she’d expect to find in the West Village than in Gavin. At the back of the shop was a kind of sitting area, a pair of pillow-strewn love seats and a low table. At the center of the table, an incense bowl gave up a wisp of silent smoke.

  Leslie closed her eyes, savoring the heady scents of sandalwood and patchouli, the perfect backdrop for browsing books on herbal remedies, spell making, or tarot reading. But when she opened her eyes again, she wasn’t looking at those kinds of books at all. Instead, she saw a scrubbed pine table stacked high with paperbacks, heavy, pulpy things with sentimental titles and covers to match.

  Nothing about the table seemed to fit the shop, especially not the florid cardboard sign hyping the best-selling novels of J. D. Hartwell, better known in romance circles as the Master of Heartbreak. She knew the name. How could she not? There wasn’t a soul on the planet who wouldn’t recognize the name of the man responsible for reducing half the women in the world to tears with his soppy love stories.