The Sisters Montclair

by Cathy Holton

  As she listened to him plan their future, building his argument so carefully and reasonably that a small part of her could not help but feel it had been well-rehearsed, her dreams of life in New York began to fade.

  What was it that she really wanted? She couldn’t say. She had built her hopes for the future on what she didn’t want, which wasn’t enough. It seemed to Alice now that she had been living a daydream, a childish fantasy brought on by – what? Her great-grandmother’s death in childbirth? Her fear that a man would love her too much, smother her, kill her with his desire? But what else was there for her except marriage? A role as a girl-about-town escort for dances and dinner parties, and later as a kindly maiden aunt who could be expected to send generous birthday presents and swoop in at Christmas with her too-wide bosom and too-exuberant greetings? Women like her did not become nurses or teachers or stenographers. At least not in Chattanooga.

  Brendan was still spinning his dream of their life together, and because she had already fallen in love with him and because she wanted to believe that her life might, after all, have some degree of happiness, she let him go on. They would buy a small bungalow first, but later a big house in Riverview. Their children would be educated. They would prosper and be happy and eventually, with grandchildren, Alice’s parents would forgive them. Would welcome them back into the fold with open arms.

  And desire. That sweet, smoky excitement so utterly strange to her. A lifetime of lovemaking with Brendan.

  There was that to consider.

  They made love again and fell asleep and when they awoke the moon was high and the bed was bathed in golden light. Alice rose with a start, aware suddenly of the late time, and the fact that her father would be waiting for her. They dressed hurriedly and drove down the sandy lane past the railroad crossing and the back of the Big House. Crossing the moonlit fields, a large owl swooped above the road. Brendan stopped and locked the main gate, and they turned and headed swiftly back to town.

  The whole ride back Alice felt a pinprick of apprehension in her chest, a small glowing ember. It persisted, swelling ominously into a flickering flame as they crossed the river, the streetlamps reflecting their ghostly shapes in the water. She was sustained by Brendan’s strong presence, his wide shoulders, his firm and capable profile. He turned to her once, and took her hand and smiled, and she saw in his sleepy eyes that all would be all right. She was comforted by this.

  Comfort, once acknowledged, began to establish itself in her heart. She felt sleepy, contented. A drowsy confidence, a sense of letting go and abandoning herself to the consequences of their decision filled her. Even her father’s certain condemnation no longer concerned her. As they swept up the wide avenue toward Ash Hill, the lights of the sleeping city laid out below them, she half-expected to turn the corner and find the house quiet, dark, her father gone to bed.

  But turning into the main drive, she was shocked to find the house ablaze with lights, every window starkly illuminated, a long line of cars snaking ominously around the circular drive in front, and out into the quiet street.

  She had seen them pass. They did not see her parked in the shadows of the moonlit crossing. She had taken the Willys coupe after her parents left for the dinner party, waiting until Simon had driven them away and then going down to the garage to retrieve the little car.

  She had overheard Alice on the telephone making the assignation with Brendan. She had followed them, not because she derived pleasure from it, but because she felt drawn to him, tethered by some invisible cord that would never break no matter how hard she tried to untangle herself. She was happy to simply drift in his presence, to be where he was. The idea of separation from him was as alien to her as the idea of separation from her own heart; there was no imagining a world without Brendan Burke, a world without his presence, his scent, his touch.

  Above her Capricornus stretched like a diadem. Look to that point there, he had told her. See? If you look you can see the head of a goat and the tail of a fish.

  Luna he had told her, pointing to the sky the last time they were out here, not long ago. The Moon Goddess. She had liked that. The story of a goddess who falls madly in love with Endymion, a handsome mortal who sleeps in a cave. Every night the goddess slips from the sky to lie beside him and every night Endymion dreams of holding the pale moon in his arms. A sweet tale of love and loss and reunion.

  Laura stepped from the car, and walking to the crossing, she lay down between the tracks and folded her hands over her belly.

  The watchman came slowly along the tracks, swinging his lantern. Dawn was coming; Warner could hear the distant chirrup of a chickadee. Further to the east, the sky was deepening into a dark purplish bruise.

  Warner sighed and looked down at the body covered by a feed sack. Above him the train ticked and hissed, rising massively into the dawn sky.

  “Conductor thought at first it was a calf on the tracks,” the watchman said, approaching. He was a good man, an old-time railroader, a competent, trustworthy man. “Tried to slow but didn’t see it in time.” He lifted his lantern so the light shone weakly on the distant Willys parked in the shadows of the tall trees. “Whoever came in had a key to the padlock. And they locked the gate behind them.”

  “Did you contact the McGuire’s?”

  “They’re on their way. No one was at the house last night.”

  They both stood looking down at the body.

  “Let’s get on with it,” Warner said.

  The watchman leaned over and flicked off the sack. They both stood quietly staring. “Funny how she could be dragged this far and her face and torso stay pretty much intact.” He glanced at Warner, shrugged. “Happens sometimes,” he said.

  “I know this girl,” Warner said.

  “What?”

  “I know her father.”

  “Oh Lord.”

  They both stood staring, the train hissing like some monstrous straining beast.

  “What’s that?” the watchman said, pointing, lifting the lantern. They were both quiet, staring.

  “Sweet Jesus,” the watchman said.

  “Pick it up and put it in the sack.”

  “I’m not touching it.”

  “All right. You go back up the tracks and collect the rest before the doctor gets here. And get this area cordoned off. Come morning there’s going to be sightseers swarming the place.”

  The watchman had already turned, heading slowly back up the track with his lantern swinging, his head bowed as if in prayer.

  Warner bent to this work. In the eastern sky Venus made her bright ascent.

  Seventeen

  When she had finished telling her tale, Alice sat quietly in the wingback chair beside the library window. A gentle agitation moved in her face. Sunlight slanted pleasantly through the long windows, warming the room.

  Stella stood and walked over and knelt beside Alice and put her arms around her. “Oh, Al, I’m so sorry,” she said.

  The old woman trembled, but she didn’t cry. She seemed sustained by something that kept her sorrowful but unbowed. Something insistent and determined.

  “It was an accident,” Stella said.

  “Was it? My parents didn’t think so. My mother thought it had something sinister to do with Brendan Burke. She was convinced he’d had a hand in it. She wanted him prosecuted. And then I had to tell them, you see. I had to tell them that I’d been with him that night, that I’d been with him all summer. I had to give him his alibi and it nearly killed them.”

  Stella tried to imagine Alice as a young girl, the horror and guilt of Laura’s death; her own misplaced sense of duty and atonement by marrying a man she did not love. She didn’t say anything but Alice saw it in her face.

  “You think I married Bill Whittington out of sacrifice?” Alice said fiercely, and something moved in her eyes then, something stubborn and slightly hostile.

  “No, Al, of course not.”

  “There’s all kinds of love,” Alice said sharply. “There’s th
e kind that comes over you like a sickness, and there’s the kind that comes on after years of shared struggle and companionship. And I can tell you, from my experience, it’s the second kind that lasts longest. The other eventually burns away like a fever. Leaving what – guilt, regret? Would I have been happier with Brendan Burke? I don’t think so. He wasn’t the man I thought he was. I got the life I needed with Bill Whittington, even if it didn’t seem like the one I wanted at the time.”

  Two young mothers pushing baby strollers passed in the street, a small ginger dog trotting at their heels.

  “It took me years to realize that, of course,” Alice said.

  “Did you ever see him again?”

  “Who? Brendan?” She was quiet for a long time, considering. “Oh, yes. But never alone. He married one of the Murchison girls, not a bad match, and they raised four daughters. She died and he inherited her money and married again. Twice, I think. Younger and prettier each time, of course.”

  Outside the window the drive was littered with crape-myrtle blossoms from the recent rains. On the desk, the old clock ticked steadily.

  Alice stirred, calmly folded one hand on top of the other. “There’s something else,” she said. There was a hint of alarm in her voice, something ponderous and immutable coming slowly to the surface. She shifted slightly in her chair, her eyes flickering over the bookcase, coming to rest, finally, on Stella. “Something I’ve never told anyone. Something I wouldn’t admit even to myself for a long time.” She raised one trembling hand and pointed to the top of the bookcase.

  “Bring me that book there, the red one with the gilt lettering.”

  Anna Karenina.

  Stella felt a vague chill of uneasiness. She went to the bookcase and pulled the novel down and gave it to Alice.

  “Do you know this story?”

  “Yes,” Stella said, kneeling beside her.

  “Laura gave it to me a short time before she died. I didn’t think anything of it at the time. She was so strange those days, so preoccupied. And later, when mother searched frantically for a note to see if there might be some reason, some explanation, why she had done it.” Alice stopped, closing her eyes. Her chin trembled. She took a deep breath and opened her milky eyes, setting the book carefully on her lap. It fell open to the inscription that Stella knew so well. “The coroner ruled it an accidental death and after awhile it became easier to accept that. To tell ourselves that she had simply fallen into a sleepy stupor at the edge of the tracks and laid down to rest. It made it easier for mother, although the town still talked, of course, they always do.”

  She fanned the pages of the book, pulled out the small scrap of translucent paper.

  “And then one night I had a dream. I was pregnant with Sawyer and I woke up and I remembered the book she had given me before she died. I had forgotten it all these years. Put it away.” She made a soft sound, almost a cry, and traced the faded words on the paper with a crooked finger. “And I knew when I read this, why she did it.”

  Stella looked down guiltily at the scrap she had read so often before, feeling again that odd sinister grip at the nape of her neck. We forgive you. Please forgive me.

  “She was carrying his child.”

  Stella looked up at Alice, met her eyes. “What?”

  “The note makes it clear.”

  “Oh, Alice, you can’t know that.”

  “Do you see what she wrote? It says, We forgive you. Please forgive me. It was her final letter to me, her sister. Her sister.”

  “No, Al.”

  “She wrote it down. She was trying to tell me and I wouldn’t listen.”

  “You can’t know that.”

  “Because I selfishly wanted what I wanted. I didn’t think of her.”

  “There’s no way you could know that.”

  “I betrayed my own sister.”

  “Al.”

  She dropped her head in her hands and began to cry softly. “I’ve carried that my whole life,” she said.

  Later, Stella went into the kitchen and made them both a cup of tea. Alice was sitting quietly in the wingback chair when she returned, her hands resting in her lap, Anna Karenina closed now and lying on the table beside the chair. Stella set the cup down on the table and pulled a low stool closer to Alice’s feet and sat down.

  “Don’t sit there. You’ll hurt your back.”

  “I’m fine.” Stella sipped her tea, thinking about Laura. The story was entirely plausible; girls killed themselves all the time in those days over unwanted pregnancies and faithless lovers. They still did. But how tragic for Alice to carry that burden of guilt all her life. How senseless and tragic and very, very human.

  Alice sipped her tea, staring out the sunny window. Her eyes, although swollen and red, were serene. She seemed calm, resigned, as if whatever tension had held her erect and mournful had dissipated. A series of light, fleeting expressions crossed her face as she stared through the window at the neatly landscaped lawn with its formally arranged shrubs and pots of geraniums.

  “I knew from the moment I first saw you that you would do me good,” Alice said.

  Stella, pleased, smiled and ran one finger around the rim of her cup.

  “You had a look about you.”

  “I feel the same way about you, Al.”

  “We were quite a pair. We are quite a pair.”

  “Quite a pair.”

  Alice looked at her and grinned, her mouth tugging down at the corners, her eyes flashing with a mischievous light. She set the cup down on the table and crossed her hands in her lap. “It’s funny sometimes how at the end you look back and realize how the people that come into your life influence you.”

  “Now you sound like a philosopher.”

  “God brought you into my life.”

  “Oh, Al.”

  “I know the young don’t believe in God. Call it fate then. All I know is that you get to be my age and you begin to see mysterious forces at work in your life. You begin to see that certain people cross your path for a purpose.” She turned her head to the window and stared fixedly at the neighbor’s yellow lab, sitting in the shade of a dogwood tree. “Although my sister, perhaps, would question whether that’s a good thing. Laura would say that being born my sister was one of the worst things that ever happened to her.” She spoke without bitterness but with a certain hard-edged resolve as if, having begun her confession, she had no intention of stopping.

  “You mustn’t blame yourself for Laura. She was responsible for her own actions. She must have realized at the moment she did it, that it was wrong.”

  Alice turned her head slowly and let her pale eyes settle on Stella. “What do you mean?”

  “She must have known it was a mistake. She must have regretted it.”

  “Afterwards?”

  “Yes.”

  “So you do believe in an afterlife.”

  Stella frowned and looked down at her hands, feeling the heat rise in her face. “I don’t know what I believe,” she said truthfully. “I just know we’re all responsible for our own lives. Our own happiness. At the last minute, Laura must have realized that what she was doing, the harm it would cause you and her parents, was wrong. And I’m sure she was sorry, Alice. She wouldn’t have wanted you to suffer.”

  Alice was quiet for a long time. “No,” she said. “She wouldn’t have wanted that.”

  Stella put her hand on top of Alice’s and left it there until Alice sighed, giving her a slight, apologetic smile. Stella squeezed once and let go.

  Alice said, “I’ve told you my story. And you have a story to tell, too.”

  “Yes,” Stella said.

  “We all have a story.”

  “I guess so.”

  “And you’ll trust me with yours when you’re ready?”

  “I will,” Stella said.

  Eighteen

  She couldn’t stop thinking about the dead girl, Laura. Her dreams were filled with great black dragons belching smoke, bearing down on her with fiery
eyes and outstretched wings. And she couldn’t forget Alice’s face either, as she told her story, her expression of anguish and determination and shame. Her old-fashioned, slightly absurd belief that fate brought people together for a purpose.

  On Saturday morning Stella rose and called her mother. It was a gray, drizzly day, the valley thick with low-lying clouds.

  “I’m driving down to Birmingham this afternoon.”

  “Oh?” Candy said.

  “I’ll stop in and see you and the boys around 2:00.”

  “All right. And I’ll make lunch! I’ll make lunch before you have to get back. You’re going right back, aren’t you? I’m assuming you’ll have to get back to Chattanooga.” She sounded nervous, as she always did when she talked to Stella. Nervous and rushed.

  “I have to borrow your car to drive to Birmingham,” she told Josh.

  “Oh, hell no.”

  “All right then you drive me.”

  “I’m not driving you anywhere. In fact, I don’t want you using my car at all. You still owe me five hundred bucks for the last two months’ rent. I’m not running a goddamn charity here.”

  She went upstairs and called Professor Dillard. Then she packed her duffel bag and her backpack.

  “Where do you think you’re going?” Josh said, as she pushed past him. He stood in the doorway as she walked out into the yard, carrying her stuff to the curb.

  “You can just leave the laptop,” he called after her. “That’ll cover what you owe me.”

  “I don’t owe you anything, asshole.”

  He walked out into the yard. “I want my money.”

  “I paid for my keep every time I did your goddamned laundry. Every time I cooked your supper. You got off cheap.”

  “You’re the worse girlfriend I ever had.”

  “Thanks. I must have done something right then.”