by Nelle Davy
Lou Parks kept his features stiff as he watched Joe scan his face for confirmation.
“How’d he hear?” he said at last.
“Telegram. Old Florence said how Leo sent a message by the wireless a few weeks back. She won’t say what it was or nothing and there weren’t no name as such, but she said the reply come back all the same and though she didn’t know what it was exactly, Leo opened it then and there in the office—he couldn’t wait. She couldn’t think what else could be so urgent.”
“That’s not much evidence to suggest it was about his brother,” Lou persisted as he swallowed another forkful of ham.
“No, no…true, but Mac at the hardware store said how their sister Piper had come down to get some more linen and stuff. Good kind, too. And when he’d asked her about it she’d sniffed and said they may be expecting visitors.”
“Could be just that,” said Lou.
“Nah, everybody knows Walter don’t know nobody outta town. Whole family what’s alive and they talk to is right here—all except his boy.”
Lou was chewing thoughtfully when he caught a glimpse of his wife slicing away a piece of cake for the minister. The layer cake was all white now, with small red rosebuds lining the corners and forming a heart of sugar flowers in the center. He saw the minister pick up the fat piece in his fingers and his head nodded in silent agreement with whatever he was thinking as he devoured it.
“Very nice, Mrs. Parks,” he said as he strode away licking his thumb thoughtfully. “Very nice.”
A shadow of something passed over Anne-Marie’s face. What, he could not tell, and then she picked up her icing and the tissue and pulled off her apron before leaving the cake. She did not take a slice for herself, or for her husband.
“I haven’t seen that man in a long, long time,” said Joe wistfully. Lou stared after Anne-Marie as she wove her way through the crowds, which parted for her, though not one person looked at her or interrupted their speech to address her. Lou’s jaw slowed to a stop. Quickly he turned back to his companion.
“So how’s your knee, Joe? I noticed you seem steadier than you were last week.”
“Mmm-hmm” said Joe, looking over his shoulder.
“Another piece of ham, Joe?” asked Lou, setting his fork down and reaching to cut a slice.
“Hmm? Oh, yes, thank you.”
“No trouble,” said Lou, heaping the plate high and then Joe pulled up a chair and began to sit down. Relieved, Lou settled himself beside him and took in another mouthful of coleslaw as they silently and methodically began to eat.
Later that night, as he waited in bed while she finished up in their bathroom, Lou thought back to the church fair. He thought of the cake and the delicate rosebuds, of the look on his wife’s face as she had stared at the minister who, blissfully ignorant, had greedily relished the slice she had cut him with only the barest of acknowledgment. She had lost herself for the rest of the afternoon, until finally she had slipped an arm around his waist just as he was thinking he would like to leave. They had passed the table with the cake as they walked to their car and he had noted that it was still as she had left it with only one slice taken away.
He wanted to tell her his thoughts: to say them and wait for her response so that maybe then he would fully understand the meaning behind what he had seen, but as ever when she stepped into the room, her body pale beneath the white cotton nightdress and her hair crowding her shoulders in waves tinged with red, he opened his mouth and the words seemed to fail him. Instead of voicing all these thoughts he said, “You know there’s talk that Cal Hathaway may be coming home.”
“Who?” his wife asked.
“Walter’s boy.”
“Oh. Why does that matter?”
He turned to face the ceiling. “No reason, I guess.” He shifted so that his back faced her when she slipped in beside him. “Just nice for Walter to have his family back.”
“What did you say his name was?” she asked.
“Abraham technically, ’cept almost everyone calls him Cal.”
“Why’s that?”
“It’s his middle name.”
“Like me,” she said quietly.
“I like Anne-Marie,” her husband said, an unexpected tenderness suddenly tugging at him. He waited for her to say something else, but she didn’t and so he untensed himself and settled down to sleep.
Outside, crickets chirped before the milk of a half moon and Anne-Marie Parks heard them well until the early hours of the morning when she finally fell asleep. She did not think about what her husband had told her; there was no immediate reason why it should be relevant to her. She did not know that she would later marry the man whose name she had so casually forgotten as she lay hugging her pillow, waiting for sleep to come. Nor everything else that would come to her: things she stayed awake aching for, night after night, until she woke beside her husband, hating the rise and fall of his back because that, and not what she had dreamt of, was her reality. She was so unaware of what lay in store, of what she was capable, or who she really was.
This was all when she was still just Anne-Marie Parks, the local doctor’s wife; seven months, four days and ten hours away from becoming Lavinia Hathaway.
When Abraham Caledon Hathaway finally returned home, it was to find his father dying. The man who had once wrestled him down and cast his belt on his back at sixteen after he had stolen the family truck and gone drinking, had withered to a husk and now lay in blue-striped pajamas on white linen sheets.
Cal had stood in the doorway of his childhood home contemplating how close his father looked to death. He was not horrified by this. He had met death already over a year ago. His wife had been decapitated in a car accident while he was out at work as a salesman. A truck with a load of metal ladders had slammed on its brakes at a red light, but the ladders had not been properly tethered to the back. At the force of the stop, one of them had dislodged and shot straight through the windshield of his wife’s car and smashed into the base of her head at the neck. Their three-year-old daughter, Julia, had been in the passenger seat next to her at the time, although miraculously she was unhurt. Cal had picked her up at the hospital after he had identified his wife. Her skin and cherry-patterned dress were still covered in her mother’s blood. He stared into the calm brown eyes of his child and had known then and there what death really was, and also, that at the tender age of three, she now knew it, too.
That was why he let her come upstairs with him to see his father when they first arrived at the house, even though his sister, Piper, had protested.
“It ain’t right,” she had called after them both from the bottom of the stairway.
“What isn’t?” their brother Leo had asked, coming in to take the lunch she had laid out for him on the kitchen table.
Piper turned. “He’s taking Julia up to see Pa.”
Her brother had humphed as he tore into a cold beef sandwich with mustard. “So they’ve arrived, have they? Anyway what do you care? It’s his kid.”
“Would you let yours come up?”
“I don’t have none so I wouldn’t know. Anyway, I’m thinking that’d be more along the lines of their mother’s call. She don’t have no mother.”
Piper jutted out her chin in irritation. “Still ain’t right.”
“He say how long he staying for?”
Piper watched her brother as he stared at her over his plate.
“I didn’t have time to ask. He just dropped his bags and went straight up.”
“No sense beating ’round the bush, I guess. He’s only here for one reason and we all know it.”
When Cal came back downstairs, he paused at the bottom step at the sight of his younger brother. Piper ignored them both and, bending down low, she faced the silent unflinching gaze of her niece.
“Do you want some lunch Ju-bug?”
Julia looked up at her father, who stared at her in silent agreement.
“She’ll ask for it when she’s hungry,” he said
.
He looked at his sister. She was still as she ever was: thin, wiry, her hard jaw and her overly inquisitive eyes searing everything with their gaze. He looked at his brother sitting at the table, staring at him thoughtfully as he ate. Already he could feel the enmity wash over him. Suddenly he was incredibly tired, and he longed for the silent confines of his small apartment back in Oregon.
He nodded in greeting.
“Long time,” he said. Leo raised his eyebrows; Piper looked at the floor.
“Could say that,” Leo replied.
“I heard you got married,” Cal said.
“Yeah. Just before the war.”
“You fight?” Cal asked, suddenly curious.
Leo used the last of his sandwich to mop up the mustard sauce on the plate.
“Yeah.” He looked up and stared at his brother. “I did my time.”
Cal looked away, as if lost in thought, before he cleared his throat.
“Did you see any action, Cal?” his brother asked softly.
Cal met his brother’s unflinching gaze.
“I saw plenty.”
“Pa’s glad to have you back,” offered Piper, the light notes of her voice grating against the air in the kitchen.
“Pa barely knows his own name,” Cal snapped. Piper looked away out onto the porch and sniffed.
Julia frowned and began to swing against the grip of her father. Cal looked down at his daughter as if he had forgotten she was there.
“Julia, this is your uncle Leo,” he said, raising a finger. “Remember the pictures I showed you?”
Julia looked at her uncle and then shook her head.
“Well, it don’t matter,” said Cal. “He was much younger in them than he is now.”
“Hi there, girl,” said Leo and gave her a halfhearted wave. He turned back to his plate. “You both gonna be here long?” he asked sharply, without looking up.
Cal gave him a level gaze and then shrugged.
“Don’t think so. Got to get back to work, for one thing.”
“Didn’t you tell them the circumstances?” asked Piper, shocked.
“Of course I did. They said I could take as much time as I needed but, uh, I just don’t think I’ll be needing that much time.”
Piper’s eyes slid away from her brother to the floor. Leo paused and then pushed back his chair before wiping his mouth on the back of his hand.
“Well then,” he said, “well then. No need to make no fuss.”
“My thoughts exactly,” said Cal.
Of course that wasn’t how it turned out.
It began when Piper came down from their father’s bedroom a few days later and started making a list at the kitchen table of things to get in town. Not from the local store, but up in the city from the place their mother had always used when she needed something special. Then she went out to see Leo. When she found him hoisting hay bales in the barn, she told him to keep the seventh free.
“What for?” he’d asked between grunts of exertion.
“Pa’s planning something,” she’d said.
“Pa can’t wipe his own ass. You’re planning something for him.”
“And?”
“And what is it for?”
“For the family.”
Leo had grunted again but he did not speak.
Then three days later, as she went to pick up some meat for dinner, Anne-Marie Parks saw Piper Hathaway order up two sides of beef, three hams, four chickens and a hog.
“You hibernating?” asked Dan Keenan from behind the counter. “If so you’re early, it ain’t even fall yet.”
“Luck favors the prepared,” said Piper as she counted out the money.
Later that week over mashed potatoes with sausages and onions, Lou Parks told his wife about the invitation they had received.
“Walter’s having a party up in the house,” he said.
“Where?” asked Anne-Marie.
“Aurelia, their farm. We’re invited.”
“Oh,” said Anne. “Why?”
“To celebrate Cal coming home.”
“That’s nice,” she said halfheartedly.
“Leo won’t think so,” her husband muttered in reply, before turning back to read his paper. And so, because he was preoccupied, she didn’t bother to question him, and as usual they finished the remainder of their dinner in silence.
Two weeks later and my grandmother stepped foot on Aurelia for the first time. The place as it was then would be unrecognizable to me: no sign in curlicue lettering, no pockets of flowers, no white house. I have seen pictures of what it used to be like. Instead of the daisies and hyacinths, the entrance to the farm was simply a sandy drive that wove its way along the crab grass. The house on the mound was not white and tall, but gray and flat with dark shutters and a roof that peeked over the front in a slanted fringe. In the distance the grass swept on and on, periodically knotted with thatches of prairie grass until eventually it found the fields of corn and the stream. It was large and expansive and Anne-Marie’s first thought when she saw all of this was that it was ugly.
Did she see everything then that it could be? Did she re-envision the sight before her and see in her mind the potential that could arise from beneath her guiding hand? It would not have surprised us if she had. In fact in some ways it is what we would have expected from her, because in the end the way she knew exactly how to mold the farm to suit her tastes and bring out the beauty in it was almost prophetic. She was so intuitive that we all assumed she must have connected to it from the first. But in truth there was no such feeling. Maybe Lavinia Hathaway would come to feel that way, but in 1946, Anne-Marie Parks did not. Instead, she did not like Aurelia and she hated the idea of going to the party.
It was not the first time this had happened. Her insides had a habit of withering in anxiety whenever she was faced with an event like this. The farm at this point was not the great estate it would come to be in my lifetime, but it was still considered to be a prosperous holding and the Hathaways were a very respected family in the community. Nobody would have missed the party if they could help it and the weight of expectation that was implicit in the invite weighed down on Anne-Marie from the moment her husband had mentioned it to her over dinner. Because no matter what she wore or how many hours she spent on her hair and makeup, she always felt like the unwanted niece of her lawyer uncle, the abandoned child, a product of other people’s charity.
It was as if she had been branded and nothing could remove it. Not seducing and marrying the town doctor; not moving into a house of her own, which was only slightly smaller than her uncle’s. Often she would wonder if this was to be it. If she would live and die as nothing more than the doctor’s wife and her uncle’s former charge. She would think these things as she cooked, or ran her errands, and she would suddenly be consumed with an urge to utterly annihilate everything around her. Once she took the kitchen knife to the soft pink curtains that hung over the window above the sink. She slashed at them, not caring where she plunged the knife, thrusting so deeply that the point scraped against the glass, leaving long thin scratches on the pane. She eventually stopped, the energy just draining from her, but once it was over she hadn’t felt contrite or ashamed. She bundled up the material, composed an excuse for her husband and ordered some new curtains from a magazine she subscribed to. Why she felt like this she did not know. It seemed to her she had always been this way: always bitter and resentful because she did not count, and even now she did not know how to change this.
As she climbed the mound to the house, which was already strewn with lights, she began to prepare herself for the night ahead. She knew it annoyed her husband that she couldn’t interact with their neighbors. He had known about the comments and gossip that started after their engagement had been announced, but only from a distance. To his face, at least, it was clear that all the men were secretly envious that he had managed to entrance a pretty nineteen-year-old. He did not know that the women had labeled his wife a harlot a
nd a temptress; that despite the respectability of his name, to them she was still no better than his whore. Nor did he ever guess at how they stared at her belly after the first six months and noted with pursed lips and inward smiles that it had continued to stay flat. He did not sense their distaste, he only saw her isolation, an isolation he believed was self-imposed. That was why he left her at gatherings. After a few weeks into their marriage, he told her that if he stayed with her, she would never force herself to socialize. He chose not to acknowledge that whether he was with her or not, it made no difference.
So when they reached the door and were shown through to the garden, he immediately detached himself, leaving her standing on the back porch, cradling the flowers she had brought and staring at the islands of people knotted among the expanse of green punctured by white-clothed tables and multicolored streamers of silver, turquoise and gold.
She moved through these islands like a navigator through treacherous waters, slipping between the gaps she could find until she reached a small clearing that had not yet been invaded. She did not even try to see where her husband had gone. She came near one of the long tables covered with steaming hams and bowls of salad and rested the flowers near the paper cups and the punch bowl. Nearby stood a group of huddled men, whom she ignored. Instead she served herself a drink, and as she picked over the food she began to wonder how she would be able to get through the evening without taking a knife to something.
“Must just eat you up, Leo,” one of the men near her said.
“He’ll be gone soon, we all know he won’t stay.”
“What was he doing up in Oregon anyway?”
“Salesman.”
“Walter knows he ain’t no farmer. Blood or no blood he’s seen you sweat over this place and he won’t do anything that ain’t in the interests of the farm. Ain’t no salesman can farm.”
“Yeah, but he did use to farm here, didn’t he?”