Blessing in Disguise (64 page)

A slide show of cow pastures and Burger Kings whisked by, one forgettable image blurring into the next. What stuck out in Nola’s mind was how hot it was. Even with the air-conditioner on
MAX,
she was burning up. She’d forgotten how unbearable the South could get in summer—hot enough to grill hamburgers on the hood of your car. Kudzu weather, a friend of hers used to call it, because at night, when it was quiet, you’d swear you could hear the kudzu growing.

Nola reached Blessing shortly before sunset, when the shadows that had been hiding out from the heat had begun to creep out from under houses and parked cars and the huge old copper beeches lining Ambrose Avenue.

She turned down Main Street, braking to let an old spotted hound amble across the intersection. Even though she no longer needed them for the glare, Nola had left her sunglasses on. She didn’t want to have to look too closely at all the changes that had taken place since she’d been down here last. How long had that been? The year she graduated from U. Mass., she recalled. She’d been visiting her friend Alice Blackburn in Atlanta, and on a whim had taken a bus to Blessing to see the house where her father’s widow lived.

Now, almost twenty years later, she saw that the pleasantly nondescript nineteenth-century brick commercial buildings had been torn down and replaced with smart-looking shops and low-rise office buildings. Even the neo-classical courthouse, though still standing, had been split up into shops, geraniums spilling over its upper veranda, and large painted wooden signs hanging between the paired columns with names like “Mad Platters Record Shoppe,” “A Stitch in Time,” and “Late Great Antiques.”

Several of the large old houses had “No Vacancy” signs in front. The bed-and-breakfast business, it appeared, was booming in Blessing. Nola’s gaze took in some kids cruising by in a white convertible, smartly dressed ladies clutching shopping bags with store logos on them, and men in business suits climbing into their Lexuses and BMWs. Only a few black faces, here and there.

Tracing the route she’d marked off on her map, Nola turned off Main Street onto Coolidge, then took the first fork. As she wound her way up Fox Run Hill, with its grand old white elephants and golf-link-sized lawns shaded by sixty-foot trees, she thought how eerie it was that the passage of time appeared to have had almost
no
effect on this neighborhood—almost as if a bell jar had been placed over it. Gracious Greek Revivals, their Doric columns gleaming like pale sentinels in the twilight. A handsome mansard-roofed Second Empire dozing benignly beneath a pair of spreading oaks, while a fleet of automatic sprinklers cast a jeweled net over the green baize lawn.

She spotted a stone house that resembled a fortress, with a prominent “No Trespassing” sign strung across the entrance to the drive between a pair of cast-iron jockeys.
One concession to the nineties,
Nola thought. Back in the old days, the jockeys’ faces would have been black. Now they were painted white.

The Truscott house was the last one on the left, at the crest of the hill, a really fine example of Queen Anne with a huge wraparound porch and a fishscale-shingled turret ringed with windows from which the reflected sun now glowed like precious rubies. Exactly as she remembered it.

What would it be like inside? she wondered.

Nola, her throat so dry she could have swallowed a spoonful of dust and not have noticed, parked the Blazer at the curb and climbed out into the soupy heat. She was immediately drenched with sweat, and as she made her way up the circular drive, she had the distinct impression of swimming—no, not swimming, more like dogpaddling—down a mossy, leaf-strewn stream. She could hear the faint tinkling of a piano—Chopin’s Nocturne in F Major, it sounded like.

Crossing the porch, as long and as deep as a country lane, its twilit shade heavy with the sweetness of the honeysuckle climbing up over the spindled railing. Now the doorbell—the old white porcelain kind. She pushed on it, heard its trilling deep within, and thought:
I don’t belong here.
She should have called from the airport when her plane got in so late, made her apologies then.

The porch light snapped on, and a heavyset black woman appeared at the door wearing a flowered dress and thick-soled shoes. She peered suspiciously at Nola, but before she could shoo her away, a pinkish blur flickered in the wavy glass of the sidelight, and a light voice called, “Why, it’s Nola Emory. I’d about given up on you.”

“My plane was delayed,” she apologized. “Am I too late?”

“No, of course not. Come in. I’ll have Netta put some hot water on for tea. Unless you’d rather have a glass of sherry? Or perhaps some of my ... Gabriel’s homemade dandelion wine?”

Oh so civilized. As if she were a cherished guest, a beloved friend dropping in for a long-overdue visit.

Mrs. Truscott even looked the perfect hostess, wearing a pastel-print dress with a softly ruffled neckline, her hair glowing like polished heirloom silver. Her nails painted a pretty coral pink. A pair of cobalt eyes that studied her intently without seeming to stare.

“Dandelion wine? That would be nice,” Nola found herself saying as she was ushered inside.

“Why don’t we step into the parlor? It’s a bit cooler in there. I’m afraid this old air-conditioning of mine is on its last legs. But I just hate the thought of them coming in here and ripping things apart. It’s amazing, don’t you think, what one can put up with when one has to.”

Cordelia, walking ahead of her, prattled on without seeming to address anyone in particular, as if she were a docent leading a museum tour.

“Amazing,” Nola echoed.

She looked about her at the ornate marble fireplace carved with rosettes and the gilded mirror above it, at the heavy mauve drapes and the oil paintings of ancestors on the walls. A Steinway. Did she play, too?

Nola sank onto a wide, claw-footed ottoman, its odd bottle-green velvet worn smooth as glass. “You get a picture in your head of how something is going to look, and mostly you’re disappointed,” she said, gazing up at the Waterford chandelier twinkling overhead like a far-off galaxy glimpsed through a telescope. “But this ... it’s just as I imagined it.” She brought her gaze back to Cordelia, now seated on the edge of a rather large and imposing Eastlake sofa, her legs crossed demurely at the ankles. “It’s lovely.”

“I’m glad you’ve come.” Cordelia spoke softly, almost dreamily, though her eyes remained fixed on Nola with a sharpness that was making her nervous. “The library ... it’s as beautiful as we both knew it would be.”

Nola felt herself warming, as if under a gentle sun, before she remembered that she’d been mostly shut out of her daddy’s life ... and now she was going to be robbed of the credit she was due as well.

My
choice, she reminded herself as the cold began once again rising in her like bitter sap.
I can’t hold that against Cordelia.

She was, and always would be, her father’s bastard daughter. Oh, damn, why
had
she come? What had she expected? Surely not the warm friendship that had come to her from Grace.

Maybe, in the end, all she’d wanted was an answer to the question that had haunted her all her life:
Why, Daddy? Why
this
woman, and not Mama?

Nola’s thoughts were interrupted by Netta bearing a heavy, embossed silver tray with two slender cordial glasses as delicate as spun sugar, and a green bottle bearing no label.

“I’ll pour, Netta,” Cordelia told her. “You go on, now—I can take care of dinner, too. I want you to go put a nice cold pack on that shoulder of yours. Gabe says it’s the best thing for bursitis. He’s got some sort of herbal potion he wants you to try. He’s bringing it by tomorrow.”

Netta rolled her eyes, but she was smiling.

“Fancy that,” the old housekeeper said, as if she were used to this Gabe person, whoever he was, playing medicine man.

When they were alone again, Cordelia poured some of the pale amber-colored wine into each glass. “He makes it himself, you know. Not just dandelion. Raspberry, elderberry, apple, pear. You should see his basement—over the years, it’s become a regular wine cellar.”

Nola sipped her wine. Delicious. Like something out of a fairy tale, ambrosial, magical, making her suddenly lighter, as if her whole body had lifted, and was hovering over the ottoman.

“I almost feel like I’m in
Arsenic and Old Lace,”
she said, her voice seeming to come from far away. “You know, where these dotty old ladies lure their victims into the parlor with a poisoned glass of elderberry wine, then bury them in the cellar.”

Cordelia laughed, a soft silvery tinkle. “It’s not poisoned, I assure you.”

“I know.” Nola, sobering, stared at her. “I guess, to you, I’m already kind of dead and buried. I mean, now that the publicity from Grace’s book is pretty much over with, and the library built, you won’t have to worry anymore that I’m going to disrupt your life.”

The words, honest and plain, seemed to come flying out of nowhere, like wasps from a nest accidentally disturbed.

Cordelia’s mouth tightened. “I don’t see any point in—”

“Please, can’t we at least be honest with each other?” She kept her tone even, but Cordelia could not have missed the tension that had risen suddenly between them. “All this talk about the library, my precious design ... but I
know
you’ve got to resent the hell out of me. Why else would you have gone on keeping my name from ever being even remotely connected with it?”

“If I remember correctly, it was
you
who suggested we keep it a secret,” Cordelia replied tartly.

“That was back when it mattered—when my saying something might have stopped it from getting built.”

“Are you saying you’re planning to go back on our bargain now?” Cordelia sounded alarmed.

“No.” Nola herself grew slack, her sudden burst of anger dissolving. “You kept your end ... so I’ll keep mine. I didn’t come here to stir up trouble, believe me.”

“You haven’t done so badly, from what I hear.” Cordelia’s eyes seemed to grow sharper, and even more blue, like sapphires against a background of velvet. “Your new business is going well?”

“Well enough so I can start sending my girls to a good school in the fall.” She straightened a bit, feeling better now. “I designed a new annex for Broadwell, and they gave me a break on the tuition.”

“Your idea to barter ... or theirs?”

Nola smiled. “I sort of nudged them in that direction.”

“I can imagine.” The diminutive woman seated before her gave a tinkling laugh. “You remind me of ...” She stopped.

Now there was only the muffled, dignified ticking of a pendulum clock deep in the house, and the subdued whirring of the elderly air-conditioner. The music she’d heard earlier started up again, Schubert this time. Had Netta left a radio on?

Finally, Cordelia broke the silence.

“I have a picture Eugene took of a museum outside of Copenhagen that we visited the last time we were in Europe—he said, if he ever built his dream house, it would look like that.” Cordelia wasn’t looking at Nola, but at some point on the wall above her head. Her eyes seemed to glisten, but maybe that was only the light from the chandelier shining on her delicate-boned face.

“The Museum of Modern Art at Louisiana,” Nola said, smiling at the thought of there being a Louisiana in Denmark as well. “Jörgen Bo was the architect. It’s one I’ve always wanted to visit”

“It’s really quite marvelous. ... I hope you
do
get to see it someday. Because that’s what I thought of when I saw your design. Not the Louisiana itself, mind you, but the
spirit
of it. I think you’ll see that tomorrow, when you visit our library.”

Our.
The word seemed to hang in the air between them.

“I should be going,” Nola said. “It’s getting late. And I ought to check in at my hotel.”

She rose awkwardly, feeling as if the ottoman, the Oriental carpet at her feet, even the walls themselves were tugging at her with their own gravity.

And then something
was
pressing her down, a small hand, soft as a moth’s wing, yet surprisingly forceful.

“Don’t go,” Cordelia said, and for the first time her smile was genuine, lighting her whole face with a kind of incandescence that Nola, in her whole life, had seen in only one other person: her father.

She felt her throat catch, then a sharp stinging behind her eyes.

“There’s someone I’d very much like for you to meet,” Cordelia went on. “A dear friend of mine, the gentleman I spoke of earlier. Gabe Ross.” She lifted her cordial glass as if in a toast. “He should be arriving at any moment. I know he’d love to meet you, too. You
will
stay for supper, won’t you?”

“Hannah, I’m so glad you could come.” Cordelia put her hand out, and was favorably impressed by the firmness with which Hannah grasped it. Not at all what she would have expected from the way Hannah was dressed, like one of those hippie folksingers Grace had been so enamored of at that age—jeans and a baggy black cotton top, her long dark hair draped about her narrow, scrubbed face.

“They couldn’t find a baby-sitter.”

For a moment, fooled by Hannah’s deadpan expression, Cordelia felt flustered; then she realized it was Hannah’s idea of a joke, and she laughed. Grace, standing beside her, laughed, too, and gave Hannah a playful nudge.

The ice was broken.

As they trooped in her front door, Hannah and Chris, followed by Grace and Jack, Cordelia had a sense that this was going to be easier than she’d feared.

Chris, at sixteen, was even taller than when she’d seen him last summer. He’d filled out some, too ... but she prayed he’d brought something to wear to tomorrow’s dedication ceremony other than the shorts and T-shirt he was sporting. Whisking his silky brown hair from his eyes with a practiced sideways jerk of his head, he offered her his outstretched palm, croaking in his recently acquired baritone, “High five, Nana.”

Grace looked as if she’d filled out some, too—not the way Sissy had—merely a new flattering softness, the sharp bones in her face not so prominent, her tomboy figure a bit more rounded. And was that actually a
dress
she had on? It’d been so long since Cordelia had seen her in anything but jeans, on occasion dressy slacks, that she could hardly believe her eyes.