Dream of Orchids

by Phyllis A. Whitney

  In the dream the empress orchid spoke to me with a voice I recognized, even though I’d never heard it before. Poppy’s voice.

  “There’s no way for you to get out. You can try the door—pound against it until your knuckles bleed. No one will come. Your father is upstairs playing the piano, and he won’t hear. The others don’t want to hear—they want you to die. I want you to die.”

  I knew I was dreaming, yet I couldn’t escape, couldn’t wake up. The only way out lay through a door that would never open.

  “Look!” The word was suddenly there, put into my mind, and the tawny flower seemed to have swelled in size—a bloated parody of an orchid. I saw the glass flask on the shelf before me, with a growth of seedlings crowding it, and I knew what I was supposed to do. I must free the plants, so they could be repotted and continue to grow.

  I must pick up the flask and break it. And I knew what would happen when I did. But someone was at the door of the orchid house calling to me, warning me. The voice was Cliff’s, and a feeling of gladness surged up in me. My father would get me out of this terrible place—he had come to save me. A warmth of love flooded through me.

  Yet somehow the flask was already in my hands and had shattered into daggerlike shards.

  I cried out and threw myself across the bed, wakening to reality. There was no orchid house, no jammed door or broken flask. But neither was Cliff alive, and there was no gladness left in me. In that waking moment I knew how much I had lost.

  12

  Days had passed since Derek’s fatal “celebration,” and nothing would ever be the same again.

  In the first shock of what had happened, numbness had kept me from feeling anything but bewilderment and disbelief. It wasn’t real—it couldn’t have happened. Now pain was like a throbbing nerve that would not let me be, that met me at every turn.

  I had just begun to find my father, just begun to love him. Perhaps he had begun to love me too, and if only there had been time … Always after death, “if only” becomes the most haunting and futile phrase, yet, for me, its torment never stopped. I went on with everyday life, but there was always the aching underneath.

  In the days that followed no trace had been found of the Aurora, or of Derek’s crew who had stayed aboard—Eddie Burch among them. Fear for the men was increasing as the news media played up this drama of modern piracy with an avidity that was all the more distressing because we were involved.

  Of course we’d been questioned and interviewed, but now there was no “head of the house” to take charge of all this. Neither Iris nor Fern wanted to deal with what faced us, and Alida drifted in and out, as lost as anyone else. Derek was busy with his own disaster and saw little of Iris at first. I was sure he didn’t really care about Cliff’s death, and I disliked him all the more for his callous indifference.

  While Marcus kept watch over Iris, he was in no position of authority, and I was an outsider whose presence was barely tolerated. I knew very well that both my sisters were merely waiting for me to go home. But I didn’t know where “home” was any more.

  We learned quickly enough about the cause of Cliff’s death. He hadn’t drowned but had suffered a massive heart attack before he went into the water. This could have been caused by shock when the Aurora was boarded. Or it could have been brought on by anything at all. No one came forward to admit to being with him at the rail that evening, so we couldn’t be sure of what had brought on his fatal seizure. The doctor said his heart had been weakening for some time, and the moment had simply come for it to stop.

  These were the bare facts concerning what had happened. They were brutally simple and revealed nothing of what we were experiencing.

  Perhaps the prosaic matters of each day were what kept us all from exploding into an anguish that I knew my sisters were feeling too. Marcus’s very grimness told me what he was suffering, and Alida looked like death itself—despairing and without hope. How much Eddie’s disappearance had affected her, there was no telling. None of us could open up and talk to one another. For me, this was the most difficult part of all—that I was walled in by myself. I’d never known before what loneliness really was. Not even when my mother had died.

  Another devastating piece of news was the revelation that Cliff had gone ahead with his changed will and done the very things I’d begged him not to do. The orchid house was to be mine. Even Clifton York’s books, with their continuing royalties, were left to me, because, as the will stated, I was the one who “cared most about them.” The house was to be my home and Iris’s for as long as we wished to stay. Eventually it would belong to Fern. There was still probate ahead, but the legacy had been made, and nothing could stop the legal wheels from turning.

  I tried to reason with Fern and Iris, to make them understand that I wanted none of this. However, refusing a legacy wasn’t as easy as all that. Especially since Iris told me flatly that neither she nor Fern would touch what had been left to me.

  My immediate impulse was to run away—to throw up my hands and go home. No one needed or wanted me here, and all I longed for was to get back to that time before Marcus O’Neill had walked into my bookshop. Only my father had really held me here, and now that tenuous bond was gone. I’d been fooling myself about Marcus, and it was time for a clean break and a new beginning. My life back home hadn’t been all I’d wanted, but it hadn’t been filled with the turmoil and pain that had engulfed me here. With this sort of reasoning, I tried to fool myself.

  If there had been a time when Marcus and I had moved tentatively toward each other, that was changed now. His main concern was clearly for Iris, and I could see how gentle and tender he was with her, how understanding of her new uncertainty toward Derek—just being there for her to lean on. He talked to me often enough, but casually, and he seemed to take it for granted that I would be all right.

  Cliff had left instructions for cremation, and this was done quickly. When his memorial service was held, much of Key West came, and I realized for the first time how many friends he’d had, even though he had withdrawn since Poppy’s death.

  For a while our emotions continued to seethe below the surface—all the pent-up anger and resentment that we’d held back until now. Then the whole stir boiled over, and the lid shot sky-high.

  The first real explosion came one night at dinner about ten days after Cliff’s death. Iris had invited Marcus to join us that evening, and even Fern, who often ate in her room or at a counter in the kitchen, joined us. From the start it was hardly a friendly meal. My sisters barely spoke to me, now that they knew about the will, and Marcus’s concern seemed to be wholly for Iris.

  I have no idea what we ate at that meal—food had ceased to matter. But as we were finishing our coffee, Fern suddenly let her fury spill out in an attack on me.

  “How could he give you my orchids!” she cried. “How could he do anything so cruel? Why did he hate us that much? I always loved him, and I thought he loved me.”

  “He didn’t hate you, Fern,” Marcus said gently.

  “Of course he hated me, or he wouldn’t have done this.” She turned on me again. “You poisoned him! You never cared about him for all these years, the way we did. We were his real daughters, and look how he’s repaid us!”

  Her words cut through whatever defenses I’d tried to raise around myself. Cliff had been cruel to me, as well as to my sisters, in what he’d done, though Fern wouldn’t see that.

  “Why don’t you go home?” she ran on. “Go up to your icy North, where you belong! Why don’t you leave us alone? We never wanted you here in the first place.”

  Perhaps her rage was justified, and it left me helpless. I couldn’t remind her of that orchid she had sent to me by Marcus at a time that seemed so long ago.

  “You haven’t any answer, have you?” she demanded, when I was silent. “There’s guilt all over you—I can see it. Because you’ve got what you came here for—you’ve taken Cliff away from us!”

  She was weeping wildly now, and she ju
mped up from the table and ran out of the room. Iris laid her napkin aside, and I felt her suppressed fury when she spoke to me.

  “Fern is right. Everything she’s said is true. I cared about Cliff’s books. I cared about him.” She stood up and followed Fern out of the room.

  Marcus had watched as if he were a bystander, and suddenly I was more angry with him than with either of my sisters.

  “I’ve had enough!” I said. “They’re both right, and Cliff should never have done this. There’s nothing to hold me here, and I’m going home as soon as I can.”

  “Your father wanted you to stay.” Again Marcus spoke quietly, and I felt that I’d have liked him better if he too had raged.

  “Then he was a foolish, misguided man,” I said. “I don’t know and I really don’t care what his purpose was. I just want to get away.”

  “Your sisters need you. Even though they don’t realize it now, they need you.”

  “That’s ridiculous! I know them better than that.”

  “I’m not usually so wrong about people,” Marcus went on gravely. “But apparently I was wrong about you from the first. Though I still remember what you said to me at the airport in Miami when you flew in from New York. You said you didn’t back out of things.”

  I stared at him furiously. My mind was made up. I would board a plane to Miami and then catch the first flight I could for New York.

  “I am backing out,” I said. “That was a foolish boast. I’ll go home tomorrow. I have a bookstore to look after and a life that’s important to me. I don’t need what’s happened here.”

  “What about Fern?”

  “What can I do? Cliff finished everything for me with my sisters when he left me the greenhouse.”

  “Don’t you see how deeply Fern is suffering, first over her father’s death, and then because of what she feels is a slight? If you stay, you’ll find a way to reach her. That’s what Cliff was counting on.”

  “He had no right to count on that!”

  “All right,” Marcus said. “Have it your way. I’ll be going along now. There’s nothing I can do for you here.”

  I realized suddenly that I might never see him again, and I went with him to the door. He held out his hand, and I gave him mine, wishing vainly that I could make him understand.

  “The trouble is, you’ve imagined me as someone who doesn’t really exist,” I said.

  He let my hand go. “You’re probably right, Laurel. I hope you find the answer to your fantasies.”

  That could never happen now. Not with Cliff gone, my sisters detesting me, and Marcus lost forever.

  I watched him walk away and get into his car. When he’d gone, I went inside to my father’s room and sat down in Poppy’s great fan-backed chair. It was as though I wanted to defy her in some way that I didn’t understand. But I couldn’t sit there for long, and I moved instead to Cliff’s leather armchair and curled up in it. Now, at last, I could cry. I let all my grieving pour out in sobs that shook me. For a long time I cried there in the darkness of his room. Then I went upstairs and packed my suitcases.

  In the morning, when I was ready to leave, I knew there was one more thing I had to do. One thing I must take away with me, no matter how I felt about my father’s actions.

  I hadn’t been up to his study since he’d died, and I went to the foot of the stairs, hesitating because I wasn’t entirely sure why I was going there now. Did I really want more pain? Yet this was something I must do.

  I’d just started up when I heard the music. I froze, listening. Someone was playing Scott Joplin on my father’s piano. Shock held me for only a moment, and then I ran up the stairs.

  Alida sat at the piano. I hadn’t known she could play, but now she was picking out the music lightly, perhaps by ear. She lacked my father’s touch, but something of her own pain came through in what should have been lively music. As I went quietly down the long room toward her, Alida heard a board creak and stopped playing to look around.

  At once she stood up to face me. “What are you doing here? You have no right to come into this room—not any more!”

  “Of course I have a right,” I told her. “Perhaps more right than you have. There’s something I want from my father’s desk.”

  “Aren’t you keeping enough as it is?”

  “I’m not keeping anything—I’m leaving. My father wrote me some letters years ago when I was a little girl. Letters that my mother returned to him. He kept a few of them, and I’ve never read them. I’d like to have them now.”

  She sat down at the piano, still watching me suspiciously.

  I pulled open a bottom drawer and began to look through it. Underneath a blue notebook lay the packet of letters, and I took it out. Before I put the notebook back, I opened its pages idly, to find that it was a journal in which Cliff had kept a partial record of his current work. Dated notes indicated his progress and listed scenes still to be written in a particular chapter.

  “You’re not to read that!” Alida left the piano and came toward me indignantly. “That’s his private journal. He never wanted even me to look at those notes.”

  Now my interest was caught, and I turned more pages until the dates ran back to the time of my coming to Key West.

  “Give me that book!” Alida commanded.

  I shook my head. “Perhaps my father would want me to read this. Haven’t you felt him here in this room, Alida? Can’t you sense that something of him is here right now?”

  She stopped with her hand outstretched, staring at me. I turned the pages and began to read.

  My eldest daughter has come to this house. She is all I could hope she would become, and I have a feeling that she is strong. Stronger than Iris or Fern. I believe she can save this house and help her sisters if she finds herself. Though she’s not ready yet.

  Someone must take hold. I no longer care enough. Perhaps Laurel can bring me to life, since she’s bursting with life herself. She doesn’t fully realize this yet, and she’s still suppressing her own feelings, holding back too much. This is because of her mother, who was a narrow, oppressive woman.

  For an instant, the old, defensive anger rose in me. I had never allowed anyone to criticize my mother. Not even me. But perhaps it was time. I had to face the fact that there was truth in his words. I read on.

  Janet was a destructive woman who tried to bend everyone to fit into her own limits. I hope Laurel can be freed eventually from her influence.

  Both her sisters need her, though neither they nor Laurel understand this. I have changed my will—for which no one will thank me—because it is the only chance of helping my two younger daughters. Without Laurel, they will tear each other apart—both loving the same man, and both loving Poppy’s orchids as well.

  His pen had hesitated at this point, leaving a mark on the paper. Then he finished with a single sentence:

  Those beastly, murderous orchids!

  After that the journal returned to a casual work record, and I found only one more personal note: “Our mistakes are always paid for.”

  For a little while longer I sat with the book in my hands, and my father seemed very close. What if I carried out his wishes—or tried to—instead of fighting them?

  I held out the book to Alida. “Sit down over here, please, and read this.”

  She took the journal from me reluctantly and sat in the red morocco chair. I watched her read what he’d written about me and saw the trembling of her lips.

  “Help me, Alida,” I said. “Tell me what I must do.”

  “How should I know? With Cliff gone …” Her voice broke.

  “There must be something,” I said.

  “You’re going away—so why don’t you just go?”

  Strangely, some of the turmoil in me seemed to be quieting—as though part of it had been caused by my own decision to leave.

  “Maybe I’ll stay,” I told her. “I think I must do what my father wanted—or at least try. It won’t be easy. But I don’t know where to star
t. Tell me a first step I can take, Alida.”

  As she watched me, some of her antagonism seemed to fade. Perhaps Cliff’s words had reached her too.

  “You could begin with Fern, I suppose,” she said.

  “How? She’s furious with me.”

  “You could reach her through the orchids. Neither she nor Iris have been near the orchid house since they found out about Cliff’s will. If you could coax her back … Before—everything happened, she was planning a special orchid display at West Martello. Get her to go on with it.”

  Remembering Fern’s anger, I didn’t know how I could persuade her to do anything. Yet some unexpected determination was rising in me. I had never really wanted to leave—I’d just been running away, if I was honest with myself. And I didn’t like running scared, giving up.

  “All right,” I said. “I’ll try. I’ll see if I can get Fern to listen.”

  Alida still looked suspicious, and I studied her. Perhaps this was the moment when she might be surprised into answering some questions she had sidestepped until now.

  “Once you asked for my help,” I reminded her. “You left a note for me that said I was to take over a burden you couldn’t carry any more. I’ve never understood what that burden was. Can you tell me now?”

  She was still on guard. “It doesn’t matter. We’ve gone way past that point. There’s no more need for you to do anything.”

  “What happened on Derek’s island after Marcus and I left that day? Derek and Iris came over, didn’t they? Did Derek do something to upset Fern?”

  She looked pale and stricken, almost about to give in, so I asked another question quickly.

  “Iris went to make a telephone call while she was with me at Derek’s place. Did she call the island? Did she talk to you?”

  “I don’t know anything about it. I was resting.”

  I would get nothing more out of her now, and I switched to something else—something I’d wanted to ask ever since that night on the Aurora.