Charlotte’s Story (2 page)

“Charlotte, Charlotte.” His voice was a fierce whisper in my ear. Was he admonishing or comforting me? Now I think it was something else entirely.

Nonie, seated behind us with Michael on her lap, released an uncharacteristic sob. Michael was blessedly silent.

Press led me back to my chair and helped me sit down. A part of me wanted to tell him about the fly, to explain, but the words wouldn’t come. People talk of the numbness of grief, but I wasn’t numb. I felt as though the outermost layer of my skin had been peeled away so that the halting breaths and pitying gazes of everyone around us chafed me like dried thistles. In the end, it was my father who calmed me, taking my hand gently as though he knew how much any touch would hurt. Father
Aaron continued the burial liturgy, condemning my daughter to darkness.

By the time we crossed the graveyard, my black high heels sinking into the soft ground as we made our way toward the line of cars waiting along Church Street, I was calmer. All was muted and quiet, and time had still not returned to its normal pace. A single white cloud hung motionless in the sky above our heads, and even the chiming of the quarter-hour from the carillon at the Presbyterian church at the end of the block seemed too long and slow. My father was at my side; Press walked a few steps ahead, his head down, the hems of his pants wearing a thin line of morning damp from the brown and gold leaves strewn over the dying grass. He seemed to be watching the ground. I couldn’t know if he had chosen to leave me to the care of my father, or just couldn’t bear to walk by my side. He had assured me again and again that he didn’t blame me for Eva’s death, but how could I be certain? Though he had been the one to leave the house while the children napped and I slept—drunk with champagne—how could he have known that I wouldn’t wake before the children? That Eva would get out of bed and try to give herself a bath? In my heart, I knew I was at fault. I clung to my father’s hand. A lifeline.

Far behind us in the Children’s Grove, the gravediggers had begun to shovel dirt into Eva’s grave. I wanted to run back to them to help. Or, better, to do it myself.

Were there places in the world where mothers were the ones who buried their children? Clearing the ground of grass and leaves as though readying it for a garden, hauling away the stones, cleaving the naked dirt with a spade, the force of it driven by their wordless pain? There could be no better way to use that pain, that sharp, relentless, endless pain that sat like a rock in my gut and pulsed its
poison throughout my body. Eva’s grave had been dug that morning (Or the day before. I didn’t know, didn’t want to know.), but I could at least help to cover her. Hide the bright, white coffin away in the sheltering earth. Who better to lay a child to sleep than her own mother?

My father’s hand tightened around mine as though he’d heard my thoughts and might keep me from turning back.

The Children’s Grove, with its pensive army of stone and marble cherubs guarding rows of small graves, had been my choice. Preston had wanted Eva buried in the gated section of the cemetery reserved long ago for the Bliss family; but even fighting from the depths of my guilt, I had won. She would sleep in the company of the twenty or so children who had died in a flu epidemic of forty years earlier, along with the several more who had been buried there since. Eva had loved being with other children and had adored Michael too. It was the right place for her.

I stumbled on a hole that had been covered by leaves, and my father steadied me.

“Are you sure you’re up to having all these people back at the house, Lottie?” He kept his voice low, no doubt to keep Press from hearing. Although he was always friendly with Press, they were never truly close. Neither of them ever spoke to me about it, but I suspect it was a mutual choice.

There was no question of canceling the wake. It was the tradition of the family to open the house to anyone who wanted to come and visit after a funeral. And there had been several funerals tied to Bliss House in the eighty years of its existence.

“Marlene will have everything ready. It doesn’t matter, Daddy. I don’t care.”

The truth was that I really
didn’t
care. Eva was dead. Let them stare. Let them wonder. Let them eat our food and gossip about us. It was both the cost and privilege of living at Bliss House, the house my father had once called “that worrisome place.”

Chapter 3

Death, Endless Death

Press’s face and shoulders were canted over the steering wheel as though he might make the Cadillac sedan—which he’d bought for me when Michael was born—go faster. Several people had approached us before we reached the car, delaying our departure, and he had stood rudely fingering his keys, tolerating their condolences. I hadn’t wanted to speak with them either, and had just nodded at first, hoping they would finish so we could return to the house and get the whole thing over with. I suppose I fell back on my training, trying to be polite even though I felt dead inside.

Press—at least this new Press—was very different from me. He wasn’t often rude, but his air of natural privilege had intensified. Months earlier, before Olivia’s funeral, he had shocked me by saying that he didn’t give a damn about the feelings of the people who kept calling and coming by to tell us how sorry they were. Father Aaron had told us grief might expose itself in unexpected ways,
and, as the weeks progressed, I found myself even a little excited by Press’s unpredictability.

“Without Olivia in the house, he can be his own man now, Lottie. That’s a good thing for you both,” my father had said.

Still, I was certain that eventually Press would again become the kind, funny, pleasant man I’d married. I did see that man again, briefly, that golden afternoon in the salon, but then he was gone forever.

When Augie Shaw, Olivia’s lawyer, went over her will with us, we learned that Olivia had specifically left half of Bliss House and the surrounding land to me, along with a substantial gift of money and jewelry. I had seen a flash of real surprise in Press’s eyes. Then he had smiled—but only with his lips. There was no doubt to whom he believed Bliss House really belonged.

By the time Eva died, his singular obsession was Bliss House.

“Terrance and Marlene are already at the house, Press. I’m sure Daddy and Nonie are there by now too.” I spoke quietly, unsure of how much to say, how to balance my own grief with my concern for him. It felt awkward, as though I were relearning how to talk, how to think.

Nonie and Michael had gone ahead in my father’s Hudson Hornet so Nonie could give Michael lunch and then put him down for his nap. You might wonder that I let Michael out of my sight now that he was my only child. It’s not that I didn’t love Michael as much as Eva, or that I didn’t worry that I could easily lose him as well. Michael has a goodness about him that’s much like his sister’s. A natural smile. An eagerness to please. He was with the two people whom I trusted most in the world and, given what had happened to Eva, I trusted them far more than I trusted myself.

Press didn’t respond, but watched the road, his hands restless on the wheel.

When Rachel Carstairs—though she was just pretty Rachel Webb, my roommate at Burton Hall College in 1950—told me about the man from Old Gate she wanted me to meet, she warned me that he wasn’t exactly handsome. But I’d immediately found Hasbrouck Preston Bliss oddly charming and funny. I had met enough handsome, not-very-smart boys at college mixers. I wanted something more.

“Press is so much fun, Charlotte. You won’t believe how much fun he is, and he’s crazy for pretty blondes. The perfect person to bring you out of your shell. You deserve some happiness, darling, and you know as well as I do that you don’t want to spend your life slaving away as an art teacher or whatever it is that you think you’re going to do.” Such a speech from anyone who wasn’t Rachel would’ve sounded vapid and, perhaps, cruel, but it was the sort of thing that Rachel—her dark eyes wide and slyly innocent—could say with utter seriousness. “Plus, he’s been moaning for the past two years that he wants to get married and stop knocking around that huge house with just his mother and those creepy servants. Well,
I
think they’re creepy, anyway.”

I’d never thought of myself as having a shell, and was slightly offended, but then Rachel was always on me to get out and socialize and to stop studying so much. I was what well-meaning adults called “bookish.” (The teenage Michael is like me in that way.) So Rachel brought me home to Old Gate and threw Preston and me together at her mother’s Thanksgiving Saturday open house.

In the early afternoon, the younger guests gathered in the pool house where there were shuffleboard, pool and ping-pong tables, a long, mirrored bar, and a real juke box with flashing yellow and
green lights. Despite all the activity around us—twenty or thirty people had already arrived, and a few couples were even dancing—Rachel wasn’t interested in anything but introducing me to Press, and led me by the hand as I followed her slight form across the room. She was even more diminutive than usual in her close-fitting Chinese silk pajamas, dramatic red and embroidered with gold chrysanthemums. Her glamorous figure, rich black hair coiffed into a sleek chignon, piquant nose and mouth beneath enormous brown eyes meant that she could get away with wearing just about anything. I’d first thought that my own dress, an ivory sheath with appliqués of dark green vines along the hem and deep décolletage, was too elegant for an open house, but Rachel had encouraged me, and now I was glad. The flat shoes felt wrong—I’d been reluctant to wear high heels because Rachel had told me Press was about my height—but overall I was pleased by the effect. Maybe I sound vain. Maybe I
am
vain, even still. But there is only one time in a girl’s life when she is twenty-one and confident in the knowledge that she is healthy and attractive. Confident, too, that nothing truly bad could ever happen to her. She hasn’t been tested.

I glanced at myself in the mirror behind the bar to see that my upswept blond hair was perfectly set, and more than one man was watching my—well,
our
—progress across the room.

We stopped in front of two men sitting on barstools, their heads close in earnest discussion. One of the men, who turned out to be Jack Carstairs, was even more blond than I, his ice-white hair clipped short on the sides, but molded with a sleek, flawless wave that angled neatly away from his forehead. Even though he was seated, I could tell he was tall by the way he hunched down to speak to the man with him. If I was more than seven inches taller than Rachel, then he was at least a foot taller. Perhaps also noticing our approach in the mirror, he turned to watch us, a hint of annoyance flitting briefly across his striking, angular face. Though I was curious about Press, I caught myself staring at Jack. The irises of his
blue eyes were alarmingly light, and I wondered for a moment if he were an albino—a kind of person I’d heard about but had never seen. His skin had a cool, pinkish-white cast, but his eyes were definitely blue. His clothes were neat to the point of fastidiousness and his hair had surely taken many minutes to perfect. Rachel had mentioned Jack many times, and hadn’t said he was a homosexual, but I had heard that homosexual men were often very particular about their appearance. (When Rachel married him a few years later, I remembered my silent speculation and had a laugh at myself.)