Blessing in Disguise (65 page)

She kissed Grace’s cheek, and smelled ... green apples. She must have washed her hair with one of those fancy shampoos that had come in the ribboned basket of toiletries that Cordelia had sent as a housewarming gift for their new apartment. She felt touched, and allowed herself the luxury of patting her daughter’s hair.

“How was your flight?” she asked.

“Not bad. We were delayed for a half-hour or so in Charlotte, but after that it was smooth sailing.”

“You should have let me meet you at the airport.”

“Heavens, no. Mother ... Could you just see all of us squeezing into your old Buick with our mounds of luggage, sitting on top of you and Hollis? We rented a station wagon at the airport. That way I could drive around town and give Hannah and Jack the ten-dollar tour.”

“Don’t let her fool you, she just likes to be in control.” Jack laughed, squeezing his wife about her waist. He made Cordelia think of a baker she used to buy bread from, a huge man with great floury hands who handled his loaves with the delicacy of a surgeon. “Grace in command, and the rest of us taking up the rear.”

Cordelia stood on tiptoe as he bent down from what seemed like an impossible height to kiss her cheek.

“Well, come in, come in,” she chimed, feeling unusually lighthearted as she ushered Grace and Jack into the sunlit front room while Chris took off upstairs with Hannah to show her the rest of the house. “I’ll have Netta bring us a pitcher of iced tea. I hope you’re hungry, that you weren’t forced into eating any of that dreadful airplane food. We’re having an early supper, fried chicken and mashed potatoes.”

“Yes, Mother, a masked gunman held a Ruger to my head and said, ‘Eat the stuffed ziti or die.’ ” Grace kicked off her high heels, and sprawled onto the chintz sofa below the bay windows, exactly as she had been doing since she was fourteen.

“Poor nutrition is no laughing matter.” Cordelia sniffed, but was unable to resist giving into the smile playing at her lips.

“I’ll second the motion,” Jack said. “All I’ve been hearing since Charlotte was how Netta was going to fatten us all up—as if I need any more.” He patted his gut.

“Daddy! You’ve gotta come see this!” Hannah’s glowing face appeared in the doorway. “A real turret, with a spiral staircase and everything, just like something out of
Wuthering Heights!”

Jack, who was heading back outside to carry in the luggage, allowed himself to be led off up the stairs.

Now Cordelia was alone with her daughter for the first time since Grace’s wedding. Grace had kept
saying
she was going to visit, but then something would come up and she couldn’t get away. So she’d send Chris by himself, always a joy, but not quite the same as all of them being together.

There was so much she wanted to tell Grace, how much she’d missed her, and how happy she was for her and Jack ... but all of a sudden she felt strangely awkward and even a bit shy.

“Sissy’s sorry she couldn’t be here,” Cordelia told her. “The boys had Little League practice, and it was her turn to carpool. She’ll be here for supper, though, and she said to tell you she’s making your favorite ambrosia salad.”

“My
favorite?” Grace laughed. “I don’t think I’ve touched the stuff since I was ten years old. I’ll probably go into cardiac arrest from all that sugar.”

But Grace wasn’t saying it to be mean, Cordelia could tell. And Lord knew, if there was one thing on this earth Sissy could do well it was that ambrosia salad of hers, which she herself had been pretending for so long to love she’d almost convinced herself of it.

“Well, you know your sister—she has a tendency to cling to the familiar. And you’ve been away for so long. ...”

“Does Sissy still make it with those itty-bitty colored marshmallows?”

“Mercy, yes,” said Cordelia, and, before she realized what she was doing, she was rolling her eyes. “If anyone were to sneak a white one in there, she’d probably call it health food.”

Grace giggled, holding her hand over her mouth. “Oh, Mother! I never thought I’d be saying this ... but I’m actually glad to be here. It’s the way I remember it from when we used to visit Gramma when I was a kid, before ...” She paused.

“Before all the trouble between you and me started—isn’t that what you meant to say?” Cordelia finished.

Grace was staring at her, one leg hooked over the other, her bare, hoisted foot jiggling like it had a life of its own. “You’ve changed, Mother.”

“Well, I stopped putting those highlights in my hair. It was starting to turn that funny violet you see on old ladies, so I just let it go natural.” She touched the ends of her silvery pageboy, which curled under just below her chin.

“You look absolutely beautiful. And you know perfectly well that’s not what I meant.” She swung her foot down, planting it squarely on the old but hardly worn Tabriz carpet in front of the tulipwood coffee table. Leaning forward with her elbows on her knees in a most unladylike fashion, she added, “I meant that you’re a lot more relaxed ... more direct. Could it have anything to do with a certain man in your life?” Her eyes sparkled.

“Well, if being direct is a disease, it is certainly catching.” Cordelia felt herself flush. “And, if you must know, it’s not serious.”

“What, the disease, or Gabe Ross?”

“You’re making fun of me now.”

“Oh, Mother, I’m not making fun of you. I’d be delighted if you were half as happy with Mr. Ross as I am being married to Jack. And from what I’ve gathered, it
does
sound pretty serious.”

“My letters, you mean?” Cordelia was surprised. She’d thought she was so discreet—only mentioning Gabe from time to time, commenting on the work he was doing in the garden, or some new innovation in his teen program at the hospital.

“I’m good at reading between the lines,” Grace told her.

“He’s asked me to marry him.” Cordelia, with an even deeper sigh, settled back against the deep cushions of the burgundy plush chair—the one that had been Eugene’s favorite.

“That’s wonderful!”

“No, it isn’t. Because I’m telling him no.”

“You haven’t turned him down yet?”

“No, but ...”

“Oh, Mother, what’s the matter?” Grace jumped to her feet, throwing her hands up in exasperation. “Does he pick his teeth after supper? Leave the bathroom door open when he takes a whiz? Wear navy socks with brown shoes?”

Cordelia felt a dart of annoyance. “There’s no need to get sassy with me, young lady. ...” She stopped, as if somehow she’d tuned into a radio channel and heard her old self talking, one of those dreadful Bible-thumping shows urging sinners to come to Jesus. She let her wagging finger fall back to her side. “Oh, Grace, it’s nothing like that. Well, I suppose it
is,
but in a different way. I just can’t see the two of us ... What I mean is, we’re nothing alike.”

“Oh, Lord, that’s exactly what
I
used to say about Jack.” Grace’s eyes sparkled. “And look where it’s gotten us. I’ve never been happier.”

“It’s not just that we’re different,” Cordelia argued. “It’s that ... we move in such different circles.”

“You mean Blessing wouldn’t approve of your marrying Gabe Ross?”

“
I
don’t care what anyone thinks, but we can’t seal ourselves away. What would my life be like without my old friends?”

“Your
real
friends would want you to be happy. And, besides, Gabe Ross isn’t the only one around here who sticks out like a sore thumb. Don’t you think it’s time you recognized what an extraordinary woman
you
are? Who among all your friends has accomplished half what you have? Just think of all the gossip and back-stabbing that’ll come of you marrying Gabe as just one more mountain you’ve got to climb.”

Cordelia, taken aback by Grace’s praise, startled herself by admitting, “He’s the only man I’ve known besides your father who sees things as they really are. But with Gabe it’s not just ... the big picture. He understands about the little things, too. And he ... he would never lie to me. I
know
that somehow, just like I know that Sissy will be stuffing that awful ambrosia salad down our throats from here to kingdom come.” She gave a short, dry bark of a laugh, feeling herself dangerously on the verge of tears.

“Then
marry
him, for God’s sake.”

Cordelia was silent for a long while. She watched Grace get up and restlessly roam about, picking up a cloisonné box here, the Lalique ashtray there, that silver-framed photo of Sissy and the boys atop the cherry console next to ones of all of them back when they were a family. She wanted to cry out.
Stop! Stop putting my life under a microscope ... and let’s just be a family again, like we were once before.
But what kind of family
had
they been? The one in that snapshot of her and Gene squinting into the camera, each with an arm about the sunburned shoulders of a pigtailed little girl, the summer they’d rented that house up at Lake Kinawasha? Self-consciously holding a pose that was never real to begin with. A family that had been her ironclad
idea
of it more than anything else.

A kind of fuzziness crept over her, like the thick layer of dust under the beds that Netta was too arthritic these days to get to. She felt more confused about Gabe than before, yet she found herself wanting more than anything at this moment to see her life as Grace obviously did, with its achievements, and the promise it still held.

“I’ll think about it,” she said softly.

This day is a gift from heaven,
Cordelia thought as she mounted the steps of the platform that had been erected on the lawn in front of the library. Poised on the edge of the dais, she looked out over the crowd gathered for the occasion, and felt her heart swell. Oh, if only Gene could be here!

But, in a way, he
was
here. Cordelia’s gaze traveled up the soaring stone facade of the library, with its staggered row of story-high windows, its angled recesses and gently sloping slate roof. The sun, backfiring off all that glass, seemed to bathe the faces below her in a kind of supernal glow, and from the grass, mown just that morning, drifted a smell she associated with everything that was good about summer—warm weather, and green, growing things. A few hundred feet away, sheltered by majestic old English oaks and catalpas, the Gothic-style brick-and-stone buildings of Latham University appeared almost to be bowing down in homage.

She marveled at the miracle of it—not just the way it had turned out, but that it had gotten built at all.

Little thanks to Dan Killian, standing over there, where they’d strung a gold ribbon between the cedar fence posts, shaking hands like a barnstorming politician with everybody who was anybody. And old Cyrus Gledding, chairman of Latham’s board, whom she’d had to fight tooth and nail against every cost-efficient shortcut he’d wanted to make—look at him now, his arm around Norwood Price, Latham’s president, posing for that
Newsweek
photographer, all puffed up like he’d not only supported her but had built the library with his own hands.

What did it matter now, though? It was here, real ... and now what looked like the whole country had come to celebrate. On one of the folding chairs set up on the dais under a canvas awning sat Coretta King, erect and queenly in an emerald suit and a black hat. Next to her, the Governor—he’d be the first to speak, after her own brief introduction. Then Senator Wirth. And Dexter Hathaway, pastor of Blessing’s largest Baptist church.

And yet all those people out there—there had to be a thousand or more—were watching
her,
waiting to hear what she would say about her brilliant, courageous, beloved ... and faithless husband. The television crews, with their vans ringing the newly landscaped grounds like so many covered wagons, armed with minicams and headphones and walkie-talkies. The old guard of Blessing, which had turned out in force. Her daughters and their children. Nola Emory, in a crisp copper-colored suit and green silk blouse, deep in conversation with Ed Karimian, the general contractor with whom she, Cordelia, had been at loggerheads for the better part of the past eighteen months. The Eugene Truscott High marching band, from nearby Macon, in their crimson-and-gold uniforms, so young and fresh and eager, their playing making up in vigor what it lacked in musicality.

And Gabe.

He stood off to one side, half hidden by one of the weeping cherries that flanked the bluestone path sloping up to the library’s vaulted entrance. Wearing an old blue serge suit that had probably fit him better back in his teaching days, and a necktie she recognized, even from this distance, as the one Netta had given him last Christmas. A bit on the garish side, but he’d been so touched by Netta’s thoughtfulness, he wore it every opportunity he got.

He saw her looking at him, and nodded, clearly not wanting to call attention to himself.

Now, as Cordelia crossed to the center of the platform under the clear summer sky, a mild breeze blowing strands of silver hair across her cheeks, she knew it was more than the triumph of this moment that was making her heart pound and her throat feel dry. She glanced down at the words neatly printed on the index cards she held clutched against the bottom button of her periwinkle suit jacket. As the band finished its enthusiastic, if slightly off-key, rendition of the national anthem, and the crowd began to applaud, Cordelia decided that the speech she’d written wasn’t at all what she wanted to say. She slipped the laboriously printed cards into her pocket, and stepped up to the microphone.

She feared that she would have to struggle to find the right words ... but when she opened her mouth, they quite unexpectedly were already there, inscribed in her heart, maybe where they’d always been.

“I don’t believe my husband needs any introduction, but I’d like to say a few words about what brought us all here today,” she began, hearing her voice bounce back at her in a chorus of echoes. “I started out some years ago wanting to erect a memorial to a man who stood for everything that’s good about this country of ours. Equality, the right of every human being to stand up and be counted. But somewhere along the way, I discovered that I wasn’t doing this just for my husband. ...” She paused, now hearing only ringing silence and the rustling of the wind in the trees. Somehow, at this moment, she felt closer to dear Gene than she had since the years of their marriage.