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his mouth with the back of his hand and handed his glass to
Maggie in a deliberate motion that ensured their fingertips
would touch. They both felt the electricity. Charlotte felt it too
and loudly cleared her throat to put an authoritative damper
on the connection.
Hank walked down the wide porch steps to the street
and turned to take one last longing look at Maggie. “Well,
goodnight, ladies,” he said, wishing he had more time to make
an impression. Maggie leaned over the porch railing to watch
him walk away,
“Goodnight, Mr. Hank Whitaker of Whitaker Property
Services,” she called after him.
Hank was still within earshot when Charlotte opened the
screen door, motioned her daughter inside and said loudly,
“Come on in, Margaret. He’s not our kind.”
Hank removed his cap from his back pocket, unfurled it and
pulled it low over his brow so that the rumpled visor pointed
in the direction he knew he was going—forward, always and
only forward.
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Donna Drew Sawyer
(II)
Maggie knew what her mother was thinking before she
spoke the words, “Not our kind.” How many times had she
heard that about would-be suitors?
Charlotte had bigger plans for her daughter than a man
who earned his living cleaning up after other people could
offer. “One step above a nigger,” was how Charlotte described
him while brushing Maggie’s hair the nightly hundred strokes
that made it shine like patent leather.
“But he’s not a nigger,” Maggie protested. “He’s going
places, Momma, I can tell.”
“Well, you’re not going with him,” Charlotte decreed. “I
want more of a life for you than that boy could ever dream.
We want a col ege man, Margaret, someone to move us up to a
bigger house on Centennial; the son of one of your father’s busi-
ness acquaintances, a graduate of the University of Richmond
or Washington and Lee, a southern gentleman.”
“They’re not really gentlemen, Momma. You know how
they are; they think every girl in Richmond, and her Momma,
wants them and they take advantage of it. They won’t see me,
all I’ll ever be is a reflection of one of them. I want a man who
sees me, Momma, who wants me. Not my family or our money.
I don’t want to be like you and Daddy.”
Charlotte’s hand stopped in midair, “Like me and Daddy?”
Maggie knew she had said too much, but it was said, so
she might as well go on. “I want more. I want to be beloved.
Do you understand, Momma? I don’t care about the other
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stuff; the house, the clothes and money are nice, but I could
be happy without—”
“Without what?” Charlotte demanded. “You have no idea
what you can do without. You don’t even know the difference
between want and need. You’ve never had to, and if I have
anything to say about it, you never will. You certainly don’t
know anything about me and Daddy, what we have and what
we don’t have. And quite frankly, Margaret Ann Bennett,
what’s between your father and me is our business and none
of yours. You don’t know anything about what we’ve gotten —
no, what I’ve gotten for you in this life. Beloved, my ass!” she said throwing the hairbrush across the room and slamming
the door as she stormed out of the room.
Maggie had gotten beneath her mother’s pristine veneer;
her Mother said “ass.” Charlotte never used coarse language
— decorum was an integral part of her careful y crafted image.
Maggie was nine years old the last time she remembered her
mother using profanity. She overheard Charlotte and her father’s
sister, Elsa, out in the yard one afternoon; her mother was using
language she had never heard come out of a southern lady’s
mouth. Maggie went downstairs to investigate and arrived at
the back door just in time to see Charlotte grab Elsa’s arm and
pull her within inches of her contorted face. Charlotte, loud
enough for Maggie and everyone in the house to hear, called
Elsa a bitch. While Elsa desperately tried to extricate herself
from Charlotte’s grip, Maggie heard her mother say she would
“beat the shit out of Elsa if—” something Maggie could not
make out. Charlotte pulled Elsa even closer and whispered in
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Donna Drew Sawyer
her ear, her spit landing on Elsa’s face and in her hair. When
Charlotte finally released her, Aunt Elsa’s eyes were wild, her
face was even paler than its normal pallid shade and there
was a crimson imprint of her mother’s fingers on her aunt’s
arm. Elsa did not even notice Maggie standing by the door as
she nearly killed herself falling up the back porch steps to get
away from her sister-in-law. When Maggie looked back at her
mother, she had fallen to her knees, her head down, her back
to the house. Her shoulders heaved—was she crying? Maggie
was not quite sure what to do. Should she go to her mother or
should she stay a safe distance from the shrew she had seen
her mother turn into? Before Maggie could decide, Charlotte
was on her feet, moving fast; she strode toward the rose arbor.
Pulling pruning shears from her apron pocket, she began to
deadhead the climbing roses like she was decapitating more
than spent flowers.
Maggie shivered recal ing that memory. She could count on
one hand, and still have fingers left, the number of times Elsa
had visited their home since then—and only when Charlotte was
away on one of her excursions to New York, London or Paris.
Maggie still did not know what provoked Charlotte that
day. She knew her mother had secrets; a person who control ed
her own life and all the lives that touched hers as tightly as
Charlotte did, must have secrets. Maggie was determined that
her mother’s secrets, whatever they were, would not control her.
Maggie had always gotten what she wanted in life, she was
certain she always would. If she wanted Hank Whitaker, then
she would have Hank Whitaker and anything else she chose.
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(III)
Charlotte stormed into the bedroom she reluctantly shared
with her husband, Walton Wainwright Bennett, III. He sat
on the side of their bed in his shorts and tee shirt waiting
hopefully for his wife to return from her nightly visit to their
daughter’s room.
“Walton, either put on some clothes or put your pajamas
on and go to bed,” Charlotte snapped on her way into the
bathroom, slamming the door behind her.
There will be no sex tonight, Walton thought as he stared at the closed bathroom door. He could hear her running the water
for her bath. He imagined Charlotte removing her clothes.
She is naked in there, Walton lusted, his penis and his mind in sync. He alone knew—at least he hoped—that the woman he
married appeared soft only when covered by the stylish clothing s
he insisted on from the department stores on New York’s
famous Ladies Mile and the expensive shops she’d discovered
in Paris. When stripped of all accoutrements, Charlotte naked,
was a bold, aggressive, powerful sexual predator. Walton once
believed he aroused that passion in her. Looking down at his
protruding bel y that completely obscured his view of his smal
feet, he knew Charlotte’s passion, like his physique, was a thing
of the past. He considered walking in on her, naked, fully
engorged; maybe she would reconsider. It had been months
since she had let him have her; but he knew better.
Walton reached around his belly and rubbed his penis,
“Down boy,” he said. Pleasuring himself was his only option
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Donna Drew Sawyer
tonight. Covering himself, he ran across the hall to his study,
closed and locked the door. While he masturbated, he imagined
himself still the man for whom the young girls of Richmond
had competed. He could have had his pick – his credentials
were the ones Charlotte insisted on for their daughter’s suitors
– but he had chosen Charlotte. Or had he?
Walton remembered the first time he met Charlotte Ann
Cox, the new stock girl at his mother’s dress shop. Wearing
the simple blue cotton shirtwaist dress with a white collar
that his mother made all of the girls in the shop wear so that
they never out shined their customers, Charlotte managed to
outshine everyone anyway. With her long dark hair, piercing
hazel eyes and olive skin, she was exotic, or was it erotic?
Her sensuality was palpable. He had stopped by the shop to
look at the store’s ledgers, something he did once a month
for his mother. But after Walton met Charlotte, he visited
three times in one week and then every day thereafter.
One day, he walked in on Charlotte in the back room of
the store. She was changing out of her uniform. She wore only
a thin slip that clung to her curves in just the right places. She
stood facing him, making no attempt to cover herself. Through
the sheer fabric he could see her as if she were naked – he, and
she, knew he had to have her.
That was 20 years ago and this is now, Walton thought
after his inadequate climax. He lit a cigarette and studied his
reflection in the glass-front bookcases that lined his study,
considering how little was left of the man he had once been.
I spend more time in this leather chair masturbating behind a
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locked door than I do making love to the woman I sleep next
to every night. After a few more minutes of disappointed
reflection, Walton stabbed out his cigarette, walked to the
door and peeked into the hall to make sure neither Maggie,
nor the maid, Frances, were around. He removed his soiled
underwear, wiped his flaccid genitals, and then threw the
garment into the laundry chute in the hall. Back in their
bedroom, he did as his wife had told him; he put on a pair
of pajamas, climbed into bed and fell asleep.
(IV)
What the hell is he doing out there? Charlotte thought as she languished in her bath until she was certain that her husband
was asleep. The luxurious warm blanket of bubbles had long
ago dissolved into cloudy tepid water. She could no longer
hear him lumbering about in the bedroom but she could smell
cigarette smoke. How many times had she chastised him about
smoking in her house?
“That’s the smell of money,” he always replied and she knew
he was right. As long as Virginia’s cash crop was tobacco and
Richmond was where tobacco was bought, sold and paid for –
her husband’s bank and her family would remain prosperous.
Charlotte stepped out of the tub and admired herself
as she patted the thick towel along the curves of her body.
Even after the single pregnancy she’d allowed, she held her
figure. She was thirty-five but could still turn heads, perhaps
not as hard and fast as she once had, but she didn’t need
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Donna Drew Sawyer
to anymore. In one generation she had seduced, calculated
and cajoled her way from a rural sharecropper shack where
tobacco was picked, to a fine city home where she saw how
that labor turned into gold; that new perspective courtesy of
Mr. Walton Wainwright Bennett III. She knew the day she
met him that he was the man she had been looking for. His
daddy was president of one of the largest banks in Richmond
and Walton III was his handpicked successor. Walton was
raised to believe he was the catch of the new century, a lie
based on his family’s money and stature in Richmond, not on
the man himself. Walton at 26 was as unattractive as he was
today; squat, balding, plain-faced and perpetually rumpled.
Even the substantial Bennett family money had not been
enough to make him attractive to most of the young women
of Richmond. Charlotte overheard them in his mother’s shop
tittering over how pathetic Mrs. Bennett’s son was—but never
within his mother’s earshot. Walton Wainwright Bennett III
was exactly what the 16 year-old Charlotte wanted in a hus-
band; a man who would be grateful for her attention and for
whose affection she would not have to compete. Walton had
the ultimate criteria—money and standing in the community;
Charlotte could have cared less about the man himself.
He had been so easy to seduce and steadfastly impossible
to dissuade when his family objected to their marriage. Now
after 20 years of having him sweat and smother her with his
needy passion the few times a year she allowed him spousal
favors, Charlotte still felt it was not too big a price to pay for
what his position afforded her in life. She didn’t love him;
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Provenance: A Novel
she wasn’t sure she could love any man. He was more like a
pet—obedient and loyal and he rarely got in her way. Despite
his abundance of inadequacies, Walton had given Charlotte
her treasure, her Margaret, and he loved their daughter as
much as she did. Charlotte made a calculated risk when she
let Walton impregnate her before they were married but her
gamble with Mother Nature paid off. Margaret, now 18, was
pretty and certainly smart enough to attract a husband from one
of Richmond’s finer families. Margaret is headstrong, Charlotte thought, but she is no match for me. Margaret was the southern beauty who would marry them to an even higher social level.
It was all Charlotte cared about, all she worked toward and
the only thing that mattered.
21
• 2 •
(I)
“Oh, it’s you again,” Charlotte said, respond-
ing to the knock on the screen door.
“Evenin’ Mrs. Bennett, ma’am. Miss
Maggie asked me to join her on the porch this evening,” Hank
said. Before Charlotte could tell him that her daughter was not
available, Maggie, dressed in a delicate summer dress and smel -
ing of her
mother’s mimosa bath oil, breezed down the front
staircase and past her mother. Without a word to Charlotte,
she swept through the screen door, grabbed Hank’s arm and
settled on the porch swing farthest from the door that, in
Maggie’s wake, slammed in her mother’s face.
Hank Whitaker was a fixture on the Bennett’s front porch
nearly every evening during the summer of 1912. Charlotte made
a point of treating Hank like the mongrel she considered him
to be, never inviting him inside the house let alone to dinner.
She ordered her husband to chaperone their daughter and Hank
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while Charlotte sat in the parlor stewing over Hank’s presence.
Walton quickly grew tired of the awkwardness of watching his
daughter and Hank watch him. Despite her pleas, he now sat
with Charlotte in the parlor most evenings.
“There is something about that Hank Whitaker that makes
me uneasy,” Charlotte told Walton who was happily engrossed
in his copy of the Wall Street Journal. “I just can’t put my
finger on what it is.”
“I don’t know why you don’t like the boy,” Walton said
from behind his newspaper. “He’s always polite and respectful
to us and to Maggie. Sitting out there on the porch with him
all those evenings, we got to talking and he’s got a pretty good
head on his shoulders. That business he owns is doing nicely.
I asked around and he’s got a dozen men workin’ for him; and
I heard he’s got most of Capitol Square as clients, even Mrs.
Atkinson’s new hotel downtown.”
“He’s not a boy,” Charlotte said, “he’s a full grown man and
a threat to your daughter’s future. He’s nothing but a glorified
janitor.”
“May be,” Walton said, “but he’s a prosperous one from
what I hear.”
•
While Charlotte and Walton bickered in the parlor, Hank
and Maggie took advantage of the time to fall in love. Their
first few evenings together they talked and laughed about some
of the eccentricities of Richmond.
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Donna Drew Sawyer
“Why do people say, ‘It’s nice to see you’ instead of ‘it’s
nice to meet you’?” Hank asked sitting as close to Maggie on
the porch swing as he dared.
“Oh, that way if they’ve forgotten that they’d met you before
you won’t be able to tell. If we’re anything in Richmond, we’re