Rain begins, pelting the stained-glass windows. Nelle closes her eyes. She was married here, has attended the funerals of her parents and brother Russell in this church. When she opens her eyes, pallbearers are lifting the casket and bearing it down the aisle. There is a small graveyard behind the church, where Victor will be interred in the Scott family crypt.
Charlie’s hand is on her elbow, raising her from the pew. People stand, allowing the family to leave the sanctuary first. Liesl snuffles, pressing a handkerchief to her face. The three of them wait in the narthex as others file past. Nelle recognizes friends and neighbors from Devon. They speak words of condolence, then hurry through the rain to their cars.
When Nelle, Charlie, and Liesl are alone, Charlie murmurs, “Well, no Abigail. She must have been too upset to come. We should have offered to bring her.”
Liesl hisses, “I don’t think so,” and Nelle likes her for the first time.
The minister appears and offers them a large black umbrella. Charlie accepts it and shepherds Nelle and Liesl out the door.
Liesl says, “I could kill for a glass of sherry,” and Nelle likes her for that too.
In the cemetery, men in work clothes have already opened the crypt. A tarp hangs over the entrance, and Nelle is glad. She doesn’t want to see the gaping tomb. The workmen wait at a distance beneath an elm. Rain batters the flowers on Victor’s casket. There are only Charlie, Nelle, Liesl, and the minister, a great figure in black who might be the same man from Nelle’s childhood. No, it can’t be. He would be a hundred years old.
There is this world, and then the other.
“Let us pray,” the minister says.
She is the only one who ever had any children. Russell and Victor and Charlie, three childless men. The Scott name stopped with them. On the train home from Philadelphia, Nelle can’t picture Charlie’s face as it is now, only as the child he used to be, absorbed in science books, poring over pictures of the aurora borealis. That was his ambition as a youngster, to see the northern lights.
She won’t be with Charlie many more times. A tide of fear rolls through her heart. She will invite Charlie and Liesl to visit her in the spring. She’ll write them as soon as she gets home. In fact, she’ll call tonight and ask if the blackbirds are gone. She finds herself believing, though she couldn’t say why, that the strange man with the wooden box will have succeeded.
As the train reaches Virginia, she finds deep snow covering the ground, glossy blue in the shadows, the air crystalline. Dudley is waiting at the station, hunched in his jacket, squinting. All her boys except John are nearsighted, as Richard was. Nelle can still see a country mile. When Dudley hugs her, she smells cigarettes and ham. No alcohol, and she sniffs again to be sure. This morning, he says, he saw two great big rabbits in the snow.
“Their footprints were big as a dog’s,” he says.
She’s so glad to see him, she can’t speak. He won’t make her talk, won’t pressure her about her trip or the funeral. He’ll be satisfied with whatever she chooses to volunteer. A wonderful quality, knowing exactly how much distance she requires.
He chuckles. “You know what I did, Mother? I leaned out an upstairs window and took a picture. I hope it’ll turn out.”
It does turn out, a scene of white velvet with bare black trees. The rabbits hover beneath a hedge, their prints a line of gray dots, and the whole image is cocked at an angle. She keeps the picture on her dresser, where it curls up in the sun, keeps it until she dies.
Hollyhocks
Every one of Dudley Fenton’s six older brothers is married, and when Dudley is drunk he can’t remember the names of their wives. On nights when Dudley is locked out of the house, head buzzing, the harder he tries to remember, the more the names elude him. The only sure thing is that eventually he will remember them, and eventually he’ll get back inside. As he circles from one door and window to the next, he knows he’s safe. Philip will have left a pantry window cracked for him. Yes, there. He finds it in the moonlight. The window is high off the ground at the back of the house, facing the Blue Ridge.
Dudley has to haul a stepladder from the tool shed, climb it, part the hollyhocks, all stiff and dead, with stalks so spiny they cut his hands, and boost the window. The effort takes all his strength. While he pushes, thoughts of his sisters-in-law run through his mind: the rich one; the shady one; the fussy one; the loud one; the prissy one; and the sweet one, who is his age and a new bride, and whom he loves.
Who locked him out of a house so far out in the country you can’t even shout to your neighbors? His own mother did it. It’s her comment on his drinking. She waits until he goes out to check on the dogs or to get a hidden bottle from his car or the barn. Then she’ll lock the windows and doors, and he has tried them, every one. In the summer or fall he’ll climb a ladder, or a tree limb if necessary, to the second floor, to ease through a French door or an open window. In winter, if it weren’t for Philip and the pantry, he’d be out of luck.
The cold’s a bear on his back, hanging on, blasting its breath down his neck.
When at last the window is up, he launches himself inside, crashing across the cabinet beneath the sill, his body unwieldy. Always he plans to thank Philip for leaving the window unlocked, but they have never spoken of this. Philip understands about Dudley’s loneliness and the drinking and probably, Dudley figures, even knows how Dudley feels about Pamela—there, her name comes to him even as he untangles his legs, bumping a muffin pan to the floor—Pamela, the sweet one. The visits to her husband’s family, Dudley can tell, are a trial to her. She twirls strands of hair or bites her lip. She doesn’t have the competitive spirit of the other wives. Her husband Barrett, Dudley’s next-oldest brother, blurts out truths that embarrass her, revealing how she worries about thank-you notes, wondering if hers are all right. The other wives pick on her or ignore her—they’re jealous, Dudley realizes—except for the shady one, who is sometimes her friend.
This big house, where Dudley and his brothers grew up, contains three floors and twenty rooms, not counting the baths. When Dudley’s brothers, their wives, and children visit for holidays and vacations, the house easily holds the entire family. Usually, only Dudley and his seventy-year-old mother live here, and Philip the cook and Edmonia the maid (though Dudley thinks Edmonia declared a half day off, this being Christmas, and went home to her people), along with Dudley’s mother’s two spoiled Standard poodles. Those poodles ought to be out with the hunting dogs, in Dudley’s opinion, out in the pen in cold fresh air acting the way dogs ought to act, but nobody can say a word to his mother about her animals.
It is Christmas 1953. Dudley leans against the cabinet and catches his breath, and the night air rushing in behind him smells of cedars and woodsmoke. It’s almost 2:00 a.m. by his watch, so it’s really the day after Christmas. In a moment he’ll close the window, but first he’ll rest.
Just before supper there was a scene. It all comes back to him. The rich wife announced that her new necklace, which she’d left on her dresser, was gone. She is from New York, and in times of excitement her voice goes very nasal. Standing on the steps down into the dining room, where everybody was gathering, she accused the shady one, “I think you took it, Theresa.”
“I saw your old necklace, and it’s too ugly for me,” Theresa shot back.
“And the fur flew,” Dudley reports now to his nephew Kenny, son of the rich one, Kenny who appears in the pantry rubbing his eyes, having dozed off immediately after the early supper served to the kids. He must have slept through the adults’ cocktail hour, the drama of the missing necklace, and the argument itself, in which his own mother had starred.
“I heard a little bit about it,” Kenny says.
Dudley steps away from the window, and Kenny closes it with some difficulty. Kenny is twelve, and his uncles are beginning to include him in their manly talk and quail-shooting excursions.
“Is everybody still mad?” Kenny asks.
“I think so,” says Dudl
ey. “Mercy.”
They laugh. Dudley wants a drink. He has hidden bottles everywhere, no matter that his mother and Edmonia root them out. Here in the pantry, behind a row of canning jars, is a fifth of whiskey. He offers some to Kenny, but Kenny shakes his head. He’s got a bag of candy in the pocket of his bathrobe, and while Dudley swallows Scotch like a man just come off the desert, Kenny sifts through the sack for the little red flower-shaped sweets that the family calls cranberries, hard enough to break a tooth.
The house is quiet until you listen close, and Dudley, drunk, has ears like a lynx. The Christmas tree, like a tired, thirsty person who has stood up too long, shifts in its stand out in the well of the staircase. It is Dudley’s job to water the tree, yet he has forgotten; he should apologize to the big shaggy cedar in its tin bucket, the bottom of the pail swathed in a sheet. He was the one who found the tree, cut it down, and hauled it back. He should water it right now, but the thought wavers out of his mind. He takes another drink.
In the silence, he feels he can hear all those people upstairs, his sleeping family. Philip sleeps out in the stable, Philip who knows so much about them all. Philip goes for men, not women, and doesn’t drink anything stronger than the cocoa he served the boys on winter nights when they were growing up, made with milk from the farm’s own cows. Philip would whip an egg in each cup to make the boys strong.
Kenny is a big boy for twelve, always hungry. He sets down the candy, and he and Dudley make their way to the kitchen, where Kenny opens the refrigerator and takes out a Smithfield ham. He carves the dense, dry meat and eats the slices from his hand. “Last I heard, Mom still didn’t find it,” he says. “They looked all over. Dad wanted to call the police, but Grandmother wouldn’t let him.” Kenny’s lips shine with ham fat. He picks out the cloves from the fragrant crust and sets them on the platter.
How did Kenny turn out to be such a sensible boy? Dudley will always wonder. Kenny’s mother, the rich wife, sometimes puts her hand on Dudley’s arm and looks him in the eye in a way not unfriendly. She was elegantly dressed when she announced her necklace was missing, her waist bound in green satin, her breasts displayed in a shiny bodice as if on a shelf.
Flying to her aid was the loud wife, the second-richest, money being its own greatest ally. Together, then, the rich one, the loud one, the fussy one, and the prissy one shut out shady Theresa and sweet Pamela, so that there, too, an alliance formed, a flimsy trust built on shared ostracism, forbidden laughter between shady and sweet.
Between them, Dudley and Kenny reconstruct the genesis of the fight and its continuation. Dudley takes a pull on the bottle. He is twenty-eight years old. He should be Kenny’s age, going to prep school.
“So then they all went to bed,” Dudley says. There’s a satisfaction in that. Everything’s clear and in focus. He still has the youngest child’s pleasure in being the last to go to bed. “We’re smart, Kenny,” Dudley says. “We know enough to stay out of trouble.”
Kenny laughs, but it’s the polite laugh of a child who has stayed up too late. In a flash, Dudley sees Kenny in fifty years, good-natured, his face red. “Stick with candy, Kenny,” Dudley says. He stands up from the table.
Dudley wobbles, and Kenny’s beside him steadying his arm. “Easy, Uncle Dudley.” Kenny’s father is the brother Dudley likes least—Vernon, the third brother, four ahead of him. Everybody caters to Vernon. Philip fixes sweetbreads at Christmas time, because Vernon loves them. Such a mean streak in him, yet he got the rich wife. Real rich, heiress to a sporting-goods fortune.
“What kind of necklace is it, anyhow?” Dudley asks.
“Kind of a pretty one,” Kenny says. “Diamonds and stuff.”
“Aw, it’s around here somewhere. Could it be in your mother’s pocketbook? Maybe she stuck it in there and forgot.”
“I guess so,” Kenny says, bored. Then he blinks. “Hey, Uncle Dudley. Have you ever looked in the dresser in the room where I am?”
Dudley knows the dresser, up on the third floor, part of a set of mahogany furniture that was once in his mother’s room. “What’s in it?”
“Fur. Tails,” Kenny says, “like the ones over the mantelpiece.”
Dudley laughs. “That was your grandmother’s hobby. Fox hunting. She kept the brushes, the tails. The ones in there,” and he gestures toward the living room—“with the heads above them? That’s what you’re supposed to do. A fox’s head is called,” and Dudley has to think for a moment, “the mask.”
“Yikes,” Kenny says, yawning.
“You need to get your sleep, young fella.”
Kenny heads into the hallway and up the stairs, and Dudley is alone again. He puts the bottle back in the pantry and resolutely hides it behind a jar of dried beans. He has the whole house to himself. He wanders into the living room, where the Christmas presents are piled: shirts and cashmere sweaters folded in cardboard boxes, bottles of Arpège perfume and talcum powder, sets of crystal goblets and monogrammed sheets, things people want when they are grown up and married. Deputized, he bought many of these items himself, with his mother’s list in his hand and her money in his wallet as he navigated stores in Culpeper and Charlottesville, enlisting the help of clerks.
“For your girlfriend?” a salesgirl asked, smiling, as she wrapped bottles of cologne.
“That’s right,” he answered, thinking of Pamela.
He touches the tissue paper that surrounds a pair of leather gloves. Each son received gloves this year. His mother gives all her boys the same gift. There are stock certificates, too, and sterling spoons. Each son and each son’s wife can lay claim to a designated stack of lovely presents in this room: on the mantelpiece, in the armchairs, on the embroidered bench in front of the fireplace. The tree is dazzling with its ornaments and tinsel. Its lights are still on, bound to be scorching hot by now.
The logical place for that necklace to be is down the rich wife’s dress.
Dudley laughs out loud. Did she look there? Thinks she’s so smart. Maybe she found it in her brassiere when she took her clothes off and didn’t tell anybody. Spiteful, that one, she and Vernon, with all that money. How is it young Kenny has such a level head? But the daughter, Kenny’s sister Joanie, is another story. She’s fifteen, hates her mother, wouldn’t come home for Christmas, insisted on going to visit a friend from boarding school. Last summer when Joanie was here, she banged her head against the wall because her parents wouldn’t let her go out with a boy too old for her. She’s scary, something not quite right about her, and Dudley doesn’t like the fact that her mother lets her smoke. Oh, he started smoking when he was younger than Joanie, but it’s different for boys.
How long has he been sitting in front of the tree, its lights pulsing in his nearsightedness like glowing fists opening and closing? He reaches up and brushes the cedar branches, the tips so needle-sharp he jerks his hand back. Has he been sleeping, sitting up? His glasses are gone. He might have set them down somewhere or they might have fallen when he was outside. That seems hours ago, when he checked on the dogs and drank in his car. It feels much later now.
Just as he remembers that he needs to put the ladder away, the ladder out there in the cold darkness, he hears footsteps on the stairs.
Even without his glasses he recognizes Pamela, her hand on the banister, Pamela wrapped in a quilted pink robe, hair pressed to her head with little pins. She pauses on the steps. He’s always surprised by how tall she is, how large her feet are. She wears pink slippers. Usually, tall women aren’t shy, the way she is.
She says, “I was just about to fall asleep, and then I wondered if anybody remembered to unplug the lights.”
“Oh!” Dudley cries, as if Pamela has announced a fire burning right in front of him. He crawls beneath the tree and yanks the plug from the socket, which results in total darkness except for scanty starlight, or moonlight, which glimmers through the long windows of the living room. Awkwardly, Dudley rocks back and sits on his haunches. For a long time they are quiet, and again Dudl
ey wonders if he has fallen asleep, if he dreamed that Pamela is there.
He has lain on the front lawn, drunk under those stars, more times than he can count—out in all seasons, hot summer nights when the Milky Way blurred over the Earth and his ears buzzed with the cries of insects—beginning when he was younger than Kenny. He has been so drunk that he’s fallen down in the snow and would have died if Philip hadn’t come looking, flashlight in hand, nudging him awake: “Mr. Dudley, lemme help you up,” though whether that was last week or ten years ago, Dudley can’t say.
Somebody laughs: Pamela. She gives the relaxed chuckle that he loves and says, “Let’s plug them back in.”
He does, fumbling under the cedar branches, knocking an ornament to the floor with his head, working the prongs into the socket. As the lights come back on, one bulb fizzes and pops. Pamela hurries over beside him and picks up the tiny shards, collecting them in her palm. He thinks it was a red light, but the bits of glass look black.
“Where should I put this?” she says.
As he stands up, his head spins. “Give it to me.” As she drops the pieces into his hands, her fingers brush his. He takes tissue paper from a box of gloves and wraps the shards.
“Well,” he says, throwing the pieces into a trashcan. He wonders what he should say or do next. His mother used to tell him and his brothers that they would learn manners if she had to beat them to death. It’s got to come naturally, she said. She did beat them, with hairbrush and riding crop, on the fanny and the hands, but by the time Barrett and Dudley came along, she was sick of raising boys. Barrett was born in 1919, Dudley in 1925, when she was over forty. He has come to believe the old rumors about her love affairs are probably true. His father dealt with that situation with such, he searches for the word, dignity. He pushes those thoughts away.
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