“I haven’t heard a peep out of her,” Violet says.
They turn to look in the direction of Miss Temple’s room at the end of the hallway.
“Maybe she’s overslept, too,” Violet says.
“That wouldn’t be like her,” Queenie says. “She’s usually up at dawn doing her calisthenics on the balcony.” Queenie approaches Miss Temple’s room and knocks on the door. “Iris?” Queenie says.
Violet winces as her shoulder sends her an urgent message that perhaps she relaxed too soon. “Be careful,” she calls after Queenie. She waits downstairs in the middle of the foyer as Queenie knocks again and then slowly opens the door.
“Lord in heaven!” Queenie shouts, disappearing into Iris’s room.
Holding her shoulder, Violet runs up the stairs to find Queenie shaking Miss Temple who lies lifeless on the bed.
“She’s not waking up, Vi.” Queenie’s voice sounds an octave higher than usual. “All this mess about The Temple Book of Secrets has gone and pushed her over the edge.”
Violet has never heard Queenie sound this frantic and it scares her. She seems to be the one over the edge. Moving closer, Violet notes Miss Temple isn’t breathing. The left side of her face droops, like it somehow melted from the heat. Violet dials 911 from the telephone by the bed. She gives the address to the operator, who assures her that someone is on their way. Meanwhile, Queenie is giving Miss Temple mouth-to-mouth resuscitation, evoking Jesus and Oprah as she pumps her chest.
“Don’t you dare die on me, you old witch,” Queenie says.
Given how Miss Temple has treated Queenie over the years, Violet considers her care heroic.
“Help is on the way,” Violet says to Queenie, who repeats the message to Miss Temple.
“She’s been so stressed about those silly secrets,” Queenie says. “Plus all that reminiscing and speaking in riddles the other night at dinner. And asking you all those questions? What was that about?”
“I don’t know, but look,” Violet says.
A note rests on the nightstand that is written in Miss Temple’s handwriting. In all capital letters it reads: MAKE APPT TO SEE BO RIVERS ASAP. CHANGE THE WILL!
“Do you know anything about this?” Queenie asks.
“Nothing,” Violet says. “But it looks like that’s one appointment Miss Temple won’t be keeping, at least not today.”
Sirens approach in the distance and stop in front of the house. Violet runs downstairs and opens the door for paramedics. As abruptly as it started, the pain in her shoulder stops. In the next instant she feels the whole house breathe, the Temple spirits offering a collective sigh of relief.
CHAPTER FIVE
Rose
You finally got your way, Mother, I’ve come home.
Rose Temple pulls the rental car in front of the Temple house and takes in its stoic presence. Despite the car air conditioning running on high, she begins to sweat. Courage is called for, but it is also mid-April in Savannah and temperatures are already approaching ninety degrees. That morning, when she left her house in Wyoming, there was eighteen inches of snow on the ground.
It has been twenty-five years since Rose returned home to Georgia. In its grandeur, the house she grew up in always seems unapproachable to her, an architectural replica of her mother. It belongs to an earlier time, when gentlemen strolled the squares with ladies wearing bonnets and carrying parasols, mirroring the aristocracy of Europe. The house rests among mature palm trees, magnolias and live oaks. Spanish moss clings to the oaks and waves in the warm breeze. The pink camellias, having already dropped their blooms, make way for abundant pink, white and red azaleas that hold onto their last blossoms of the season as if to prove their resilience. She could use some of this resilience herself right now.
Rose gets out of the car realizing how good it feels to move. After spending the entire day sitting in cars, airports and planes, her back has been complaining.
A small group of tourists stand on the sidewalk and look up at the house.
“Hey, do you live here?” a lady asks. Short, perky, and middle-aged, she wears a T-shirt that reads: I Heart Savannah.
“I used to live here,” Rose says. “A long time ago.”
“I can’t even imagine,” the lady says. She nudges her friend with an elbow, as if Rose is some kind of celebrity.
Just because you grew up in a mansion doesn’t mean you had a happy childhood, Rose wants to tell the woman. Yet, there were moments of her childhood that were incredibly happy. They just didn’t involve her family.
Five days ago Rose received a frantic phone call from Queenie at six in the morning. Rose’s mother was unconscious, having suffered a massive stroke. Queenie had gone into a long explanation over the phone about how The Temple Book of Secrets had caused her mother’s collapse. In a weird way it made sense that her mother might fall on the same sword she’d been wielding all these years.
Rose considered not coming to her mother’s death bed. After all, she lives far enough away that she almost has a legitimate excuse. But for some reason, she feels the need to see her mother one last time. For closure, if nothing else.
The Temple mansion looms above her. In the shadow of the live oaks, Rose feels herself become more protective. Twenty-five years ago, she broke off contact with her mother for reasons of self-preservation. Given the amount of inheritance she chose to forgo, most people would not understand her choice. Luckily, her husband, Max, had spent enough time with her mother to understand and be supportive.
After walking through the black wrought-iron gate to the east side of the house, Rose follows the groomed pathway through the garden. She pauses outside the kitchen door, looking back over the mature landscaping and dense shade sprinkled with handfuls of sunlight.
“God, I’ve missed shade,” she says aloud. She could have saved a fortune on sunscreen and moisturizer if she’d never moved to Wyoming.
The magnolias emit an aroma reminiscent of her childhood. The garden, lush with growth, resonates with vibrancy. This is the part of the house that Rose was always drawn to. As a girl she imagined it her secret garden after she read the book by the same name. The garden is hidden from the street and has a high brick wall around it.
A stone fountain graces the east wall, an impish looking gargoyle spouting water from its center. Moss covers the stones at its base and climbs upward, a green beard stretching to connect with the face. Koi fish live in the wide base of the fountain and flash like golden gemstones through the murky green water. Sounds of the trickling water almost lulls Rose into the belief that nothing bad could happen here.
The salty smell of the sea travels on the breeze. Compared to the dry air of Cheyenne, Savannah drips with moisture. It clings to Rose and pulls her clothes close. She closes her eyes and takes in the faint smell of salt water, the ocean only a few miles away. Whenever she smells the sea she thinks of Old Sally. She wants to see her again.
Rose fans her overheated face and chides herself for forgetting about the heat. It is too hot for blue jeans, a cotton shirt and her cowboy boots. At least she left her Stetson at home. Her clothes help her remember who she is now. She isn’t the lost young artist who left here twenty-five years ago. She is the woman who co-owns a thousand acre ranch and sells her art in a prominent gallery in Santa Fe. Yet as soon as Rose exited the plane in Savannah, she felt herself weaken. It is as if her past has been waiting in the baggage area to be claimed and she is now saddled with it again.
Memories greet her everywhere. She looks up at her mother’s bedroom window, half expecting to see her standing there. In the heat, a chill crawls her spine. Walking the garden path, she takes in the regal live oak she played under as a child that stands in the center of the garden. Branches of the oak are as thick as entire cottonwood trees at home. The oak’s massive limbs touch the ground in places. The roots rise up to greet the limbs and it is hard to tell which are which. Moss carpets cover the ground underneath. As a girl, Rose and her best friend, Violet, creat
ed a doll hospital under this tree. They made beds out of twigs and moss and wrapped bandages around her dolls arms and legs and spent hours nursing the dolls back to health. Perhaps she gave the dolls the care she never got from her mother.
Don’t start this, she tells herself. No pity parties allowed. She forces herself to stand straighter.
Near the carriage house, someone moves out of the deep umber and forest green shadows. Rose emits a slight gasp, but when the man smiles—looking pleased to have startled her—she realizes it is her brother, Edward. His hair graying at the temples makes him look distinguished, and his clothes convey the same attitude. Even Edward’s smile is a tool of intimidation.
“Should have known you’d show up,” he says. Edward, who is six years older, puts his hands on his hips, as if to reinforce his dominance.
Rose and her brother have never been close. The last time she saw him was two decades earlier at the Denver airport during a two-hour layover for a flight from Los Angeles.
“I suppose you’ve come back to make sure you don’t miss out on the inheritance,” he says with a smirk. Even in middle age he has managed to throw her off balance. But she has no intention of letting him know.
“Actually I’ve come to pay my respects,” she says.
“Right,” he says. “I know exactly how much you respect our lovely mother.”
His sarcasm sounds so much like their mother, he could be channeling her.
Don’t let him get to you, Rose tells herself. She’s only been back to Savannah for an hour and already she’s talking to herself.
When they were young, she did her best to avoid Edward. She wishes she could avoid him now.
“You haven’t changed,” Rose says.
He tucks his light blue oxford shirt into his tailored navy pants. Does he think her comment is about his boyish figure?
A ghost of a memory taps her on the shoulder and she remembers another sword that has nothing to do with secrets. Rose glances at her left hand where the tip of her little finger used to be, severed at the first joint forty years before. She lost it when she was almost five years old, Edward ten. He convinced her to play Cowboys and Indians and Rose was the Indian.
“We had some good times in this garden, didn’t we?” Edward’s smirk changes to a smile that appears almost genuine.
Is he serious? she wonders. “I don’t remember them as good times,” she says to him. “You used to lock me in the garden shed.”
“It was the stockade,” he says. “You were an Indian. It was where you belonged.” He smiles again.
Interesting that he would bring up belonging, she thinks. For the last twenty-five years she hasn’t felt like she belonged anywhere.
“You had no business getting Grandpa Edward’s sword,” Rose says. It has taken her forty years to address her brother’s recklessness.
Their grandfather’s collection of weaponry dated back to the Civil War. Elaborate cases for these weapons extended down a hallway in the back wing of the house. Old Sally always mumbled to herself when she polished the dark wood of the cases, saying incantations to protect her from the evil these weapons had been used for.
“Oh, come on, it was fun,” he says.
“Fun?” she asks. Since when is severing body parts—even small ones—fun, she wonders.
“When you tattled to Mother she smiled, remember? It was weird the things that would get her attention.” He laughs as though it is a treasured memory. A treasured memory that gave Rose nightmares for years.
A scream replays in her mind. A scream that brought Sally flying out the kitchen door, and sent Edward running back into the house. Sally wrapped her hand tight in a kitchen towel and ran with Rose in her arms all the way to the doctor’s office, several blocks away. Whenever her various therapists asked for her earliest memory it was always this one she recalled.
Old Sally kept the fingertip wrapped in wax paper in the freezer. A week later she and Queenie, with Violet still in a stroller, gave a funeral for it in the garden. Queenie sang a moving rendition of Swing Low, Sweet Chariot, while Old Sally unwrapped the wax paper to reveal the severed fingertip. Before its internment, Sally poured a black root concoction over it and said a spell. As far as Rose knows, the tiny bone is still buried under the live oak in between two of the biggest roots.
“It wasn’t that bad,” Edward says, glancing at her hand. “Simply a casualty of war.”
“We weren’t at war, Edward,” Rose says.
“Weren’t we?” Edward asks. “Mother and Father pitted us against each other.”
Now that she thinks about it, they did. Their parents were embroiled in their own version of the War Between the States and Rose and Edward were required to take sides. It was like each parent took a hostage while they were growing up. Perhaps to take the focus off how unsuited they were for each other. Edward was her mother’s favorite and Rose was her father’s.
The Temple women were never good at nurturing their offspring. Although her relationship with her daughter, Katie, is a healthy one, it is mostly due to Queenie and Old Sally’s influence. It also helped that Rose refused to be anything like her mother.
Her father was the kind one, the gentle one, to the extent that someone pickled in bourbon could be. He died during her freshman year at Smith and she skipped an entire semester to grieve. Yet her mother’s pending death seems entirely different. Rose’s grief at never having her mother’s love has filled much of her life already. In fact, her mother’s impending death almost feels like a relief. At the very least, it will mark an end to Rose’s lifelong dubious hope that her mother might become a different person—someone who is kind, loving and tolerant.
For as long as Rose can remember, Edward wanted their mother to be proud of him. Unfortunately, she valued ruthlessness in her males and even as a boy he tried to become what she prized.
“Don’t think you can waltz in here after twenty-five years and get any of Mother’s money,” Edward says, his words pulling her out of the past. “I’m the one who stuck around and protected her interests.”
In your endless pursuit of her approval, Rose thinks.
However, before Rose can respond, Edward exits the garden and gets into a silver Mercedes next to the carriage house. For several seconds she waits for her breathing to return to normal. She didn’t anticipate seeing Edward, at least not right away, and it has shaken her. Facing her mother again was a big enough challenge already.
What will it be like to see her mother again? She was her daughter Katie’s age when she last saw her and now she is middle-aged. Rose can’t imagine she will derive pleasure from her mother’s vulnerability. When both parents die, you realize you are next in line.
Rose wishes her husband, Max, hadn’t been needed at the ranch. Max is the antithesis of Edward. A solid, kind man who has an ability to make sense of things. Though she wonders if anyone can make sense of her family.
Rose takes another deep breath telling herself to relax. After all the therapy she’s had at least she’s learned to breathe. When she’s calm again she continues through the garden to the kitchen door. It feels odd to knock at the door she used daily for the first two decades of her life. A woman answers, of early middle-age and with a glowing smile. At first glance, Rose thinks it is Queenie, but then she realizes it is Violet, who was four years younger than Rose yet a best friend for most of Rose’s childhood.
“Should we do the Sea Gypsy handshake?” Violet asks.
“Oh my, I haven’t thought of that for years,” Rose says, returning the smile.
As girls, Rose and Violet created a secret society called the Sea Gypsies, complete with secret handshakes and rituals. Rose and Violet decided that Queenie was the Sea Gypsy queen and they were princesses. Up until then, Queenie’s name had been Ivy. One entire summer they wore only blue clothing because it was the sacred Sea Gypsy color. For years she has added that color to everything she paints, if only a single brushstroke.
Old Sally made them all sp
ecial swimming caps with sparkling blue, green, and silver sequins. She still has that old swimming cap back home in Wyoming. This is part of the past that she doesn’t mind remembering.
Violet, a pretty child, has now blossomed into a striking woman. With skin the color of coffee with extra cream, she looks like a walking advertisement for the Coppertone perfect tan. In comparison, Rose feels old and leathery. The Wyoming dryness and long winters have done nothing to preserve the little bit of beauty she felt she possessed in her 20s and 30s.
In her early years, Rose spent hours in the kitchen with Old Sally, Queenie and Violet. Old Sally seemed to be raising everybody in those days. Then Violet came to work for Rose’s family shortly after Rose’s father died and it got a little strange. Plus Rose went away to college to major in art and to avoid her mother. She soon figured out ways not to come home. Friends in New York and Boston invited her to stay for the holidays. Friends whose families impressed Rose’s mother enough that she didn’t complain. During that time, Rose and Violet somehow lost touch.
Violet ushers Rose into the kitchen and the two women have an awkward moment of deciding whether or not to embrace. The embrace wins out.
“It must be strange to be back,” Violet says.
“You don’t know the half of it,” Rose says, remembering Edward’s appearance in the garden.
Rose glances around the kitchen. She has fond memories of this room. Except for newer appliances, and a darker shade of taupe on the walls, it has changed very little in the last twenty-five years. Her kitchen at home is chaotic. Dishes need washing, mail is stacked to read and groceries need to be bought. Rose forgets how smooth things run when someone else is in charge of a house—someone whose entire job is to maintain order and keep things running smoothly.
What a luxury, Rose thinks, although she lived with this luxury the first twenty years of her life.
“I spent most of my childhood in this kitchen,” Rose says. “How is Old Sally? The last I heard she was still going strong.”
Temple Secrets: Southern Humorous Fiction: (New for 2015) For Lovers of Southern Authors and Southern Novels Page 4