The Ada Decades

by Paula Martinac

  “Gosh,” Ada said. “I thought she was from Georgia. I didn’t know she ever even lived in Charlotte.”

  “Neither did I,” Auggie said. “Cam’s the one told me. She’s a font of obscure knowledge.”

  Ada pictured Cam’s intent gaze when she was speaking about something with authority. “Thank you for showing me, Auggie. I just love that novel.”

  “We should read it for the next installment of the book club, don’t you think? Carson has such a deep appreciation for freaks.” Ada smiled at the tender way he emphasized freaks.

  “I’m not sure it’s the right thing for me. The club, I mean, not the book. Though I do appreciate you going to all this trouble to be so sweet to me.” He was still mesmerized by the bungalow. “I’m just not . . . I’m not sure I’m like y’all.”

  That broke the spell. “Why, sure you are, honey.” It was so matter-of-fact, Ada felt she might believe it, too. “Why else are you spending so much time with our Cam? Why aren’t you out there finding yourself a diamond ring instead? How old are you anyway?”

  “Twenty-three.”

  Auggie clicked his tongue. “You better be careful. Old maidery is just around the bend.”

  “So my mama tells me,” Ada said, smiling.

  “She likes you so much,” Auggie continued after a pause. He didn’t have to say her name; a ripple of excitement traveled up Ada’s arms from her fingertips just the same. “You’re all she talks about these days. I haven’t seen her so peppy since Viv.” He dropped the name lightly, like a handkerchief slipping out of his pocket. “She made this little book club just for you. How else do you get a librarian to come over and meet your friends? She would have preferred a softball team, that’s for sure.”

  His words made her forget the name Viv. Ada could hear

  her heart pumping. It wasn’t that she hadn’t considered she might be different. But twice before, she had dismissed her crushes on women as something she’d outgrow in time. One was understandable—a schoolgirl infatuation with Miss Ruthie, who treated her with respect and caring. The other was Natalie, and she was much harder to brush off.

  “Do you ever wish, well, that we could be more to each other?” Ada had ventured once with Nat, when they were flopped across Ada’s dorm-room bed after a perfectly lovely day of doing nothing but being together. She wasn’t even sure what more would be, but at that moment she would have been willing to experiment.

  Ada’s eyes traced a crack in the ceiling as she waited for Nat’s response. “Whatever do you mean?” Nat said, sitting up and smoothing her skirt. “We’re close as sisters. There’s nothing more to be.” Uneasiness sliced through Nat’s voice, and it wasn’t long after that she started seeing Hank in earnest. He’d been just a casual date up till then, but by the end of the term, she was wearing his grandmother’s diamond.

  Now, when Ada got letters from Nat, she still felt a dull ache, like a tooth on the verge of going bad. It had been hard to hear that there was a baby on the way.

  Hank and I are over the moon! Nat wrote to break the news. My prayer is that you will know this same happiness soon, Ada dear.

  Had she found happiness, she wondered, and just didn’t want to face it? The men she met were dull or patronizing, while she wished her coffee conversations with Cam would never end. It was a feeling that seemed more profound than Nat’s comment about Hank when she got engaged: “He suits me, and he’ll be a good provider.”

  “You want to head back?” Until Auggie handed her a handkerchief from his suit-coat pocket, she hadn’t realized her eyes were filling up.

  “Oh, Auggie, I am too mortified.” She bit her lower lip and forced herself to say, in a hushed voice, “Can I ask you something?”

  “Shoot.”

  “Are you . . . with Twig? I mean, are you two together?”

  His chest puffed out a little. “A year this June.”

  “And is your life together . . . hard?”

  Auggie took both her hands in his—such a sweet gesture that if someone had passed them on the street, they might have mistaken them for lovers.

  “Honey, he’s the best thing about my life.”

  Ada withdrew her hands after a moment and removed a pen and her prized notebook from her pocketbook. She ripped a sheet clean out and awkwardly started to write on it. Auggie interrupted her, offering his back as a makeshift desk.

  When she finished writing, she creased the paper into fourths and pressed it into Auggie’s palm. “I can’t go back there. Not today. But please give this to Cam, and don’t you dare read it.”

  Making the trek back across town on the bus, Ada imagined Cam’s reaction. She pictured her anger when Auggie came back alone, her refusal to take the note he handed her. Finally, she’d slide it into her pocket with a scowl, maybe tell herself she’d toss it out unread. Not until everybody had left and she was alone in the apartment would she take it out and unfold it. Maybe she’d read it twice. Would she understand? Would she throw it away, or would she smile and make a call?

  The phone rang at Ada’s house a little before ten. “Who’s calling at this hour?” she heard her mother ask. “Some folks have to work in the morning!” There was a muted exchange before Ada heard her mother’s footsteps outside her bedroom door.

  “Ada Jane, there’s someone from school who says she needs to talk to you. Seems right urgent to me. Camellia Somebody.” Ada opened the door to her mother’s curious look, the one that questioned why she couldn’t just be like other girls. “Isn’t she the one you had supper with not too long ago?”

  Ada waited until her mother went back to her bedroom before she picked up the receiver. “Cam? Is everything okay?”

  Cam’s voice was a husky whisper. “Auggie gave me your note.”

  The message she’d written had been simple but heartfelt: Cam, I’m new at this. I need to know this is serious for you. I feel a lot for you, but I’m not sure what that means. Love, Ada.

  She had faltered with the closing, thinking Yours too suggestive, Best too cold. Fondly sounded like somebody’s great-aunt Maybelle. So she scrawled Love, and then her hand trembled as she signed her name, making each a more rounded and the d more squiggly.

  Now Cam was still talking, but she sounded far away, like she was calling from the coast. “I would never rush you. I know it is a lot to think about. But darlin’, I have never felt this way about anyone. Ever.”

  Ada paused. The tube of coral lipstick flashed into her mind, the way it had claimed its space in the medicine cabinet. She imagined Cam leaning in to someone’s lips. “Ever?” she asked with caution, aware her mother might be listening.

  Ice rattled on the other end of the line. “I have been in love,” Cam said slowly. “I’m not saying you’re the first. I’m just saying . . . all I mean is, this is different.”

  “And your friend Lu?” She hesitated, twisting the phone cord.

  “Oh sweet Jesus, no! Lu Pardue is a friend, nothing more. I swear to God.”

  “Don’t swear,” Ada whispered. “I believe you.”

  A pause stretched into ten seconds, twenty or more. Cam said something about meeting the next day after school, just to talk, and Ada shivered with the anticipation of it. She had set something in motion, and the funny thing was, the fear had left her. All she felt now was a mixture of joy and relief.

  A Normal Life

  1960

  Ada

  The ride into Davidson took them down streets of elegant old manses, but somehow Ada had expected Cam’s family home to be less imposing. When Cam pulled the Plymouth to the curb in front of a stately white residence with a red-ribboned pine wreath in each window, Ada’s throat went dry. The modest mill house she had lived in since birth would fit into this building three or four times, possibly with room to spare.

  “I can’t go in there,” she said.

  Her fear didn’t seem to faze Cam, who simply lit a Lucky and said, “The house won’t bite.”

  House was hardly the right word.
Ada hadn’t seen anything so grand since she was at school in Chapel Hill. But it wasn’t so much the physical building that terrified her: She couldn’t imagine finding things to say to the people who called such an opulent place home.

  So even after Cam hopped out and hauled the suitcases onto the sidewalk, Ada was still sitting resolutely in the passenger seat with the door closed. Cam tapped on the window, and she lowered it with reluctance.

  “I guarantee you my folks’ll notice if you don’t come in for two whole days.”

  “You said they had money, Cam, but this.”

  “Oh, the college built this back in the day,” Cam said, as if two stories and a wraparound porch were nothing of note. “Daddy doesn’t own it. He just gets to live here while he chairs the department. Lord, darlin’, my old man worked his way through graduate school. Mama’s the one comes from money. If you think this is too much . . . well, remind me never to take you to her

  family’s place in Savannah.” Cam opened the passenger door for her. “This is no big deal, I swear.”

  A Negro answered the front door in a tuxedo and white gloves, and Ada swallowed hard. In her change purse, she had stashed a slip of paper like an emergency insurance policy, with their friend Auggie’s phone number on it. “Honey, if you feel too out of place, I’ll come get you in a heartbeat,” Auggie had offered. Twig had gone to family in the mountains for Christmas, leaving him on his own in his tiny apartment, and Ada knew the weight of the holiday was bearing down on him, too.

  “Merry Christmas, Miss Cam,” the butler said. “And this must be Miss Ada. Merry Christmas to you, too. Let me grab those bags.”

  “I can manage, Samuel,” Cam insisted. “I’m guessing we’re in my old room.”

  Samuel looked bewildered. “Miss Daisy said put Miss Ada in the blue room,” he replied. “Mattie’s got it fixed up special.”

  Ada read the confusion on Cam’s face. She had assured Ada they’d be in the same room, that whenever she had come home from college with roommates or friends, they shared her big four-poster. (“Mama thinks nothing of two girls together,” she’d said.)

  “I thought we’d be doubling up, what with Lily and Parker and the little one here, too.” Cam’s tone sounded insistent, like she expected Samuel to change her mother’s arrangement on his own.

  “Miss Lily and Mr. Parker are at Miss Kathryn’s,” Samuel explained.

  “Much to my chagrin,” came a silken voice from across the foyer. “I would have loved to have both my girls under one roof again, but I didn’t want us getting under each other’s feet.” It seemed unlikely in such a big house, but Ada doubted anyone challenged Mrs. Lively’s directives.

  “Merry Christmas, Mama!” Cam said, going in for a big squeeze. Ada watched as Cam’s mother air-kissed her instead, protecting the thinning pageboy that was so teased and sprayed it resembled a helmet. It had likely been blonde at one time, like Cam’s, but the color now had more brass to it than honey.

  “Oh, we just do not see you enough!” Mrs. Lively said, holding Cam by the hands and taking full stock of her. “When was the last time?”

  “Must have been Daddy’s birthday,” Cam said. “Mama, this is Ada Shook, my very best friend in the world. Ada’s the school librarian at Central. We met on her first day, and we have been fast friends ever since.”

  Ada smiled tightly, wishing Cam would stop emphasizing their closeness. She wondered if Cam’s mother had already intuited something about them, and that was why Ada was sleeping in the guest room.

  “Aren’t you darling,” Mrs. Lively said. Ada couldn’t tell if her eyes were just naturally twinkly or if she was tearing up a little. “And what stunning hair!” She reached out to finger one of Ada’s locks, which she wore down when she wasn’t at work. “What do they call it—cinnamon?”

  “It’s not from a bottle, Mama,” Cam said.

  Mrs. Lively’s intimacy with her was unexpected, even though Cam had warned her that her mother “might try to swallow you whole.” When Ada pressed her about what that meant, Cam merely smiled and said, “You’ll see.”

  “Thank you for inviting me, Mrs. Lively,” Ada said, to shift the focus off her appearance. She instinctively used her church voice. “This is such a beautiful home. I was almost scared to come inside!”

  Cam’s mother gave her a curious look. “Did Cam tell you?”

  “Tell me . . . ?”

  “That the place is haunted.”

  “Why, no, I just meant . . .”

  “Because it is, you know. The people who lived here before us. He was the chair of Philosophy, and she . . . well, she slit her wrists in the bathtub, poor thing. I replaced it when we moved in because it seemed like bad luck.”

  “Mama thinks most places are haunted because she’s from Savannah,” Cam said with a wink.

  “No, Camellia, I have heard her. She calls out ‘Charles, Charles!’ At least, I think that’s what she’s saying. The husband married a bit too soon after her death, if you know what I mean, but he came to no good in the end.” She paused for effect. “Incinerated in a fiery car crash.”

  “How terrible, Mrs. Lively!” Ada said.

  “Please, dear, call me Daisy, everyone does. Now why are you still wearing your coats? And those suitcases should go upstairs. Samuel, would you mind?”

  “This isn’t Tara, Mother, I can carry our bags,” Cam said, still clutching the handles.

  “Don’t be flippant with me, Camellia,” Daisy said. “Samuel makes a fair wage, don’t you, Samuel? Now come with me. Mattie’s made canapés and a big batch of milk punch.” Daisy took Ada by the arm, her grip almost urgent, and led her into what she called the “parlor,” as if it were a century earlier.

  Ada’s eyes wandered the length of the room, from the baby grand and nine-foot Christmas tree at one end to the floral-upholstered sofa and chairs at the opposite. There was a tasteful fire in the hearth—not too low and certainly not roaring, but just enough to give the room a rosy warmth.

  “Sit right here next to me,” Daisy said, pulling Ada onto the sofa. “Camellia, I’m going to ask you to serve us some punch, if you don’t mind, honey.”

  “Where is Daddy?“ Cam asked, as she ladled out three cups, but Daisy ignored the question.

  Ada saw Cam sneak a swallow and then refill her punch glass. The more time they spent together, the more she noticed how much Cam drank—when she was happy, when she was nervous, when she was mad; just about any time, really. It took quite a while for her to get drunk (“I’ve got a hollow leg,” Cam liked to brag), but there were times when she clearly was. On New Year’s Eve a year earlier, she’d actually run the Plymouth up onto the lawn in the front yard of her apartment building, flattening a holly bush.

  “Bring those here, and don’t you get ahead of us,” Daisy said.

  Cam delivered the drinks, then went back for a tray of deviled eggs, candied pecans, and shrimp salad on toast points. Ada took one hesitant sip of the punch and set the crystal cup politely on the table.

  “Oh!” Daisy said, after her first taste. “Mattie has outdone herself. Just the right amount of bourbon.”

  “Could use more, you ask me,” Cam said.

  “Don’t you like it, Ada?” Daisy leaned into Ada, closer than was comfortable, as if she were her oldest and most cherished friend. It was an education for Ada, who now understood where Cam had learned her way of drawing people in.

  “I’m not much of a drinker. I get that from my mama, I guess. She’s a staunch Methodist.”

  “Well, no harm done,” Daisy said, but Ada wasn’t sure if she meant about rejecting the punch or being a Methodist.

  “Where is Daddy?” Cam’s head turned again and again toward the French doors, like it was on a swivel.

  “Well, now, you have hurt my feelings. I haven’t seen you since summer, and all you can talk about is where your father is.”

  “I’m sorry, Mama,” Cam said automatically, making Ada wonder how often she apologized to her mothe
r for such small slights.

  “Anyway, your father called a while back and told Samuel he’d just be ‘two shakes.’”

  Cam groaned. “Well, we all know what ‘two shakes’ means.”

  “Let it go, Camellia. Your father works very hard.”

  “Even on Christmas Eve?” Ada ventured.

  “My husband would work Christmas Day if our girls weren’t here,” Daisy said. She tugged down the sleeves of her angora sweater and smoothed her skirt, picking at pieces of lint that only she seemed to notice. “Last month, I called the English Department secretary and actually made an appointment to see him!” Her laugh sounded scratchy, like a worn record. “He did not appreciate the humor in it, I can tell you that.”

  “I think I’ll just go to the study for a minute and call him,” Cam said, popping up. “He needs to get himself home.”

  Ada shot Cam a look that beckoned her not to leave, so Cam motioned for her to come along “to see the rest of the downstairs.”

  Daisy tugged at the sleeve of Ada’s dress. “Why don’t you stay, dear? I haven’t gotten to know anything about you yet.”

  “We’ll be right back, Mama,” Cam said.

  In the foyer, Cam grabbed Ada’s hand and they crossed to a room clearly decorated for a man, with leather chairs and polished mahogany bookshelves built right into the walls. With the door closed behind them, Ada sank into a chair and let out a gust of a sigh. “I was terrified you would leave me alone with her,” she whispered. “She’s so . . .”

  “Needy?”

  “I would have said lonely. I wonder what she does with your daddy gone so much.”

  “She redecorates a lot,” Cam replied, dialing. “That parlor we were in? Five times in ten years at least. And she volunteers at this and that. That kind of thing.” The rings were audible through the line—five, then six, Ada counted. “What is taking so long? I’m sure he’s right there, re-reading The Great Gatsby and swigging back some bourbon.”