“Condolences from a friend.” And I thought again what a good friend she had been. She’d refused to be put off when I turned inward after the divorce. She alone understood my grief when David died. I wondered if Pickett might be that kind of friend.
The messages were from Mr. Satterfield, each one more pointed, asking when I wanted to go to Avoca.
“That Mr. Satterfield—he called three or four more times, saying you’re not to go to the goat lady’s house without you take him.”
“I’ve already gone. In fact, I was there all day.”
“Oh. You shouldn’t have done that. That Mr. Satterfield evermore will be put out.”
I eyed the clerk for a moment before I shrugged. “That’s just too bad. If he calls again, you tell Mr. Satterfield that he can just kiss the dog’s foot.”
Chapter Seven
WALKING TO MY ROOM FROM the elevator, I whistled—something I thought of as common, like chewing gum and smoking on the street. Had I always been as proper as an oyster fork, or had my sense of humor died with my marriage? I used to be fun, a wit, had even been considered a cutup. Perhaps my friends—all but Caroline, at any rate—shunned me not because I was divorced but because I’d become a bore.
I intended to enjoy myself tonight, since the bellhop was bringing me a bucket of ice and a bottle. “In Colorado, the best whiskey is sugar moon from a town called Leadville,” I told him. David and I had gone there every summer to stock up. “Do you think you can you do as well?”
“We got white mule. Tastes like pure silk. That ’shine suits me.”
“Then your moonshine’s bound to suit me, too.”
While waiting for the man to return, I took out Amalia’s quilt diary. An unfinished block for a crazy quilt fell out, and I ran my fingers over the rich scraps of fabric, outlining with my fingernail a horse that Amalia had appliquéd onto one patch with tiny gold stitches. I rubbed the silk velvet against my cheek. My hands itched to work with fabric again. It had been months since I had made anything, and I missed the peace and sense of accomplishment that sewing gave me.
Perhaps I would take out my scraps of fabric and lace and create a picture of Avoca in all its faded grandeur and aloofness. The technique was one I had thought up myself. Peering through a magnifying glass, I used tweezers to pick up threads and scraps of fabric, some less than an eighth of an inch in size, and glue them to cardboard to create landscapes and portraits. The materials were so minute that people mistook the collages for watercolors. “You’ve created a new art form,” David had told me once, putting a brush into the paste pot, then spreading glue on the back of a fabric scrap for me. I realized there must be scraps of old fabric at Avoca that I could use.
After the bellman brought the bottle, I dropped ice cubes into my tooth glass and poured in bootleg until it was halfway up the glass, then sipped. The whiskey was strong, and I filled the glass with water, then took it to the desk and set it beside my mail and the carpetbag.
I ignored the messages from Mr. Satterfield, since it was too late to call him, and picked up Mother’s letter, which was just like her—optimistic, chatty, and a little bit gossipy. She had tucked in a clipping about an event next month to raise money for caps and mittens for children of impoverished miners. The headline read CITY’S SOCIAL HEADS PLAN LUNCHEON and under it in smaller print, it said, “Fete to be presided over by Mrs. Frederic Atherton Adams and Mrs. Arthur Ransom. Mother wrote that she’d run into Betsey Ransom, who had asked to be remembered to me. “Betsey said to be sure and call her when you get back. She’s such a lovely girl,” Mother wrote.
I finished the drink, which did not taste like liquid silk, but more like ground burlap, and filled the glass with more whiskey and water.
Betsey Ransom. No, I would not call her, not for all the tea in China, for fear of what I might say to her.
Staring at the brown liquid in my glass, I remembered when Betsey and Arthur were new in town and David had asked me to attend to her. I liked her, of course. She was a pretty little thing, with skin as white as aspen bark and pale yellow hair that frizzed out over her head like a dandelion gone to fluff. She had a mischievous smile, but in fact, life bewildered her, and her interests did not go beyond Arthur and her children. Arthur appeared devoted to her. He was a buyer at Neusteter’s, a women’s specialty store, and when he brought her presents—jewelry, perfume, clothes—she’d clap her hands like a little girl and squeal, “Oh, Artie!” as she squeezed her eyes shut and held out her hands for the boxes. Arthur dressed her in the slinky gowns that were popular, although David had remarked to me that they made Betsey look like an usher at a movie theater. David had had a nasty streak, but in this case, he’d been right.
She was easily frightened. On summer outings, Betsey stumbled over rocks and scraped her arms against branches. Once, as we stood on a rocky escarpment on a mountain top, she became so dizzy that her legs buckled. David, who was standing next to her, swept her up and carried her away from the cliff, then set her down, propping her back against a lodgepole pine. While Arthur stood helplessly, David wrapped his coat around Betsey and rubbed her hands.
“Get some water,” David told Arthur, who looked around for a stream. “In my knapsack,” David added sharply.
Arthur simply stood there, looking stupid, so I grabbed the canteen and handed it to David.
“That’s the stuff,” David said as Betsey took tiny sips.
She ran her hands through her pretty hair and looked up at David with the trust of a child. “That was swell of you to catch me like that. I was awfully scared. You’re a peach of a fellow. I suppose now I’ve spoiled our day.”
“Oh, cut it out!” David told her.
“You hold on there,” added Arthur, who had turned manly again. “It’s a scary spot to be in. Why, any girl in the world would have passed out with fright.”
As I was a girl and had not grown weak in the knees, I was annoyed and perhaps a little jealous at the way the two men fussed over Betsey. “Now that everything’s back to normal, why don’t we have lunch,” I said brightly.
“Oh, I couldn’t,” Betsey said, and David seemed to glare at me.
After that, I saw less of Betsey, but David became closer to her. “Arthur’s no good in a crisis, and Betsey does need looking after,” he explained, then added, “She’s about as entertaining as a piece of chalk. How have you stood her all this time?”
When Betsey got pregnant with her third child, David was as solicitous of her as Arthur was. When the baby was born, a boy named James David, we were the godparents, and it was David who picked out the silver cup and had the baby’s name and birth date engraved on it. Once, I heard David say, “Oh, I could just eat you up.” At first, I thought he was talking to Betsey, but of course he’d directed the remark to the baby.
I began to think about children again, although we had put the hope of babies behind us years before, when the doctor said I wasn’t likely to have them. David had always said children didn’t matter because we had each other, but maybe he had changed his mind. One evening as we sat over cocktails, I brought up the subject of adoption. “It’s the perfect solution. We would have a child of our own, and we would save some poor foundling from growing up in an orphanage. When you look at it, it’s a selfless thing.”
David stood up and looked out at the park, where a fresh snowfall outlined forgotten graves, for the park had once been a cemetery. With his back to me, he said, “No, it wouldn’t work. If we had our own kiddie, well, we would do our best. But I’m really not cut out to be a father.”
“You’d be a wonderful father.”
“No,” David said, and we did not discuss it again.
I wondered even then about David’s preoccupation with Betsey, since she never read a newspaper or a book, never had an original thought. It was no surprise that Arthur spent so much time outdoors, mountain climbing, skiing, and motorcycling with David and the other men in our set. So it should have been no surprise when Arthur suggested
that he and David take flying lessons. For some perverse reason, Arthur seemed to enjoy frightening Betsey. David once observed, “Arthur treats her like china under his hooves.”
Much as I wanted to be a better sport, I agreed with Betsey that flying was out of the question. “You simply mustn’t go up in an aeroplane,” I told David. “I would fret so.”
“How can you be such a ninny?” We were eating breakfast, and David put down his fork so hard that it fell off the edge of the plate and hit the table. “I spend my days holding hands with doddering old ladies. Aren’t I entitled to a little excitement?”
Remembering that conversation now, I poured more whiskey into the glass, adding neither ice nor water. He was so seldom cross with me back then that his virulence had shocked me.
“It’s just that you read about so many crashes. What would I do if something happened to you?” I picked up David’s dirty fork, which had left a spot of yellow from his boiled egg on the tablecloth, and put it onto my own plate.
“You’re as tiresome as Betsey.”
“I thought you admired her.”
David did not reply, just gave me a withering look. He stood and picked up his coffee cup by the bowl and drank, then set down the cup on the edge of the saucer, and it tipped over, spilling coffee across the tablecloth and onto my dressing gown. David did not apologize, just folded the newspaper under his arm and, without a word, left for work. We did not mention the squabble, and the following Saturday morning, he took his first flying lesson.
Looking back at it now, I realized it should have been obvious that David was unhappy, but that did not occur to me then. I thought only that we were having disagreements, like other married people who’d been together for a decade. We still had wonderful times together. In fact, those last months—that was the Christmas I gave David the silver tea set—were among our happiest. I had not known such contentment could exist.
The glass of whiskey was still in my hand, and I carried it to the window and looked out. The Mississippi was not visible, but I felt its presence, the way I felt the presence of the mountains at home, and suddenly I had a great longing to see the river, so I set down my glass and left the hotel.
I walked the few blocks to the Mississippi and stared into the silent blackness, then turned back to the hotel, walking past the dark bank building where Odalie had hailed me that morning. Just then, a very old man came out of the shadows, a rummy, from the smell of him. He put one hand on a stone column to support himself and said unsteadily, “Nobody’s going to bother you when you’re with me.” He nodded solemnly to reinforce his statement and then asked, “You got any spare change?”
Ignoring him, I started off.
He took a step after me, stumbled, and put both arms around the pillar to keep from falling. “Hey, snooty lady,” he called after me. “Jesus loves you.”
I laughed, and not for the first time thought this would be a good story to tell David, then remembered I could never tell him anything again. But I could tell Caroline, and maybe Pickett. That made me feel better, and I returned to the hotel.
As I prepared for bed, I saw the miniature trunk of envelopes. Too curious to let them sit in the carpetbag all night, I spread them across the desk. To my disappointment, they did not contain real letters, only scraps of paper. Scattered among them were rose petals as faded and brittle as parchment. The notes, some thirty or forty of them, were written in pencil, and many were illegible where the lead had smeared or been rubbed faint. Most were only a sentence or two, sometimes just a word: “Tonight.” One read, “Thank you, dear thing,” and another said, “. . . when darkness covers daylight.” They were written in the same hand. On a scrap of foolscap was “I glory in your love.” One note said simply, “I love you.” The signature was always an elaborate B.
B for Bayard. But when had they been written? There were no dates, no reference to current events. They could have been written half a century ago, for all I knew. The notes did not answer any of my questions, only added to them. Returning the scraps of paper to their envelopes, I picked up the quilt diary again and examined it more thoroughly. It was a record of the quilts Amalia had made. She’d sketched patterns and scribbled notations about materials she’d used. She’d even attached scraps of fabric with straight pins, which were now rusty. Paging through the book, I stopped to examine a swatch of white cotton with black horseshoes printed on it. In places, the horseshoe shapes had been eaten away by the harsh chemicals in the black dye. Next to the swatch was the notation “B’s shirt.” On the next page was a drawing of two entwined initials, AB, the monogram embroidered on the quilt on Amalia’s bed. The B was the same stylized letter Bayard had used to sign his notes. The initials didn’t stand for Amalia Bondurant at all, I thought. They were for Amalia and Bayard.
Mr. Sam was breakfasting with his table of pals, whose ages appeared to range from thirty to ninety, when I entered the dining room the next morning. Before they could rise, I slid into a chair next to Mr. Sam, startling the men, and it occurred to me that I had joined a table reserved for males. I returned the surprised looks with a smile, knowing these gentlemen were too polite to ask me to leave. Besides, they knew Amalia, so they shouldn’t be surprised that I did as I pleased.
“Good morning, Miss Nora. You’re looking like fine china today,” Mr. Satterfield said.
The waiter came, glancing around the table to see if any of the men objected to my being there, then took my order for coffee and a boiled egg. “Oh, and may I have a basket of beaten biscuits, too, please?” I smiled at Mr. Satterfield.
“It appears you have taken to our ways.”
“Only in matters culinary, Mr. Satter—Mr. Sam. I haven’t acquired your good manners, or I would not have gone to Avoca by myself yesterday. But you see, I didn’t know it myself until I did it.”
Mr. Sam was much too polite to chastise me. Nor did he remark about Natchez women. “I forgive you for that,” he said. “You must have wanted to get a feel for the place without an old man telling you what was what.”
When I protested, Mr. Sam put up his hand. “You’re safe enough out there with old Ezra.”
“You find any haunts out there, did you?” asked a man dressed in a limp seersucker suit. He had a napkin tucked into his shirtfront; in fact, I was the only one at the table who didn’t. The man sliced his ham into neat pieces and cut the pieces in half. “There was a story down to the drugstore this morning that somebody’d been out to Avoca and told Son Boy, the fountain man, that there was a plenty of ghosts there.”
“That Son Boy, Wash!” Mr. Sam said. “It’s just his foolishments.”
“Not likely,” Wash told him. “Son Boy says it was a woman, and she wasn’t a ghost; she was real. Yes sir, he spoke the truth. No ghost ever left him a two-bit tip.”
“No human being ever left that much to Son Boy, either,” Mr. Sam said, and they all chuckled.
I ventured that rumors of ghosts at Avoca might keep the curious away from it.
“No, ma’am, not so’s you’d notice,” the young man told me. “Besides, there’s not a one of these old places that isn’t haunted by ghosts—or memories. You take your choice.”
“And one or two by goats,” I said.
They laughed, and Wash said, “Boys, she’ll do!”
“Didn’t I tell you she was a card?” said Mr. Sam. “Didn’t I?”
“I didn’t personally encounter any ghosts at Avoca, unless you count Magdalene Lott, but my impression is that she is still very much alive. Of course, I could be mistaken.”
“Oh no, ma’am, no mistake there. She is with the living, God bless her,” Mr. Sam said, rolling his eyes.
“Magdalene Lott,” Wash said, looking pensive. “I recall her back when I first remember about things. She was a finely-looking woman with a morning-glory air, a real lady.”
“No such a thing. That’s what they call her, a lady, but she isn’t. Never was. I’d call her everything but a lady,” scoffed a very old ma
n who had been eating scrambled eggs with a spoon. His head was as smooth as a darning egg, but his gray beard, which had gone to seed, was long as his arm. He was tiny, probably not much more than five feet tall, although since he was seated, I really could not tell. He sat up straight, making every inch count, and lifted his chin. “Back in them good old times gone by, she was pretty, but she was always a spitfire. We all thought it was passing strange that Bayard married her. He pro’bly reared and pitched and did it only ’cause Miss Amalia wouldn’t have him.” The man shook his head, which was crisscrossed with veins.
“Now sir,” Wash protested.
“You are too young a man to have known her in her day.” He turned to me. “I myself am eighty-eight.” He pronounced his age “ada-ate.”
The waiter interrupted, setting down my coffee and filling the other cups. The men busied themselves by pouring cream and sugar into their coffee, stirring and tasting, until the waiter finished and was out of earshot.
“Now, Uncle Doctor, Miss Magdalene was a badly used woman. You know that,” said a man about my age, who sported a gold tooth. He turned to me. “Dr. Aldrich is a physician to nervous ladies, and as you might imagine, such are as common in Natchez as old clothes.”
“What’s that?” The doctor said in a loud voice to me, “Never nobody tells me a thing because I don’t hear so good. If I get something wrong, it’s no fault of mine. My left ear don’t hardly track at all.”
The nephew repeated himself.
“My knowledge don’t come from treatment of Miss Maggie, for I never took her in charge in a professional way, never would. She is the most unpleasing woman I know.” Looking at me, he added, “Begging your pardon for speaking so of any female woman.”
We all waited for the old doctor to continue.
“It is generally known that Bayard married Miss Maggie to spite Miss Amalia, but he only spited hisself. And it served him right, the worthless pup!” The man laughed—a scratchy, choking sound. “Bayard was thought to fall on his sword, as was the saying then, when Miss Amalia cast him aside. He’d already bought the silver service and ordered up new draperies for Shadowland—and those Lotts couldn’t hardly afford the expense. They been high-and-mighty at one time, with corn land so rich, it growed roasted ears, but no more.”
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