Daughter of Deceit (15 page)

She filled the bottle with water to what she hoped was the former mark. With luck, Katharine didn’t drink gin, or would think it had gone flat.

But for once in Bara’s life, alcohol failed her. She could still remember what she was trying to forget: If Winnie had been in Italy until the middle of February, she could not be his daughter. And her mother—prim, self-righteous Nettie—

It was unbelievable. Unthinkable.

Hurrying to the table, she snatched up the citation Katharine had printed out and read the last line again.

Panic consumed her. She shoved all the citations back into their folder, the Medal of Honor printout on top. She grabbed the medals and flung them into the cigar box. She tucked them under her arm, snatched up her purse, and strode toward the front door.

Katharine looked up from her computer. “The dates for the battle are right,” she called. “Are you leaving?”

“You bet I am.” Bara thrust her feet angrily into her sandals. “I’m going to find somebody who can tell me what the hell this is all about.”

Bara roared down the Murrays’ drive so fast she took out half a hydrangea when her car veered off the asphalt. She careened through Buckhead with one question circling her mind: If she wasn’t Winnie Holcomb’s daughter, who was she?

Even in Bara’s wildest days, crazy from her beloved grandmother’s death and railing against her mother and all the senseless, stuffy restrictions she despised, the knowledge that she was Winnie’s daughter had been her anchor. It had restrained her from removing all her clothes in the fountain, tempered her foot on the gas pedal as she drag-raced down Peachtree Street, kept her insouciant in the Fulton County Jail. She knew Winnie would arrive with her bail. Knew she would still have his love even if, temporarily, she lost his approval.

He’d had a wild streak of his own. He and Oscar Anderson had taken flying lessons in high school against their parents’ wishes. In their senior year, they “borrowed” (without permission) two small planes belonging to friends of their fathers and raced them to Jacksonville on a dare. Scrapes they had gotten into during college sent them into roars of laughter sixty years later. It was because Winnie could already fly that he’d become a bomber pilot when the war began. For a time, he’d been a flying instructor out in Oklahoma.

But if he had not gotten home from Italy until February, her mother would have been well and truly pregnant by then. Would he have stood for that? Stuck with Nettie? Probably. Winnie was an honorable man and an Episcopalian. They didn’t get divorces back then.

Like many children, Bara had always regarded her parents’ courtship and early years of marriage—even Art’s birth—as a mere prelude to her own appearance. She vaguely knew they had gotten engaged the year Nettie made her debut, married after Winnie graduated—ending Nettie’s college education after her sophomore year. “Education is not as important as good breeding, for women,” Nettie was fond of saying, smoothing her skirt over her well-bred knees. Art had been born in 1941, while Winnie was at Emory Law School. The war had interrupted Winnie’s law studies. Nettie and Art had moved back in with her parents during the war, into the house Bara now owned. Nettie was ostensibly awaiting Winnie’s return.

What had she really been doing?

When Winnie came home and decided to pursue architecture instead of law, had he chosen Columbia and moved to New York in June instead of waiting for fall because his wife was growing visibly pregnant and they didn’t want people to know?

Nana Payne must have known. Was that why she was so kind to Bara? Had her kindness been pity, not love?

Bara had to pull off the road, shaking with terror. Winnie and Nana Payne had been the pillars of her life. If they crumbled, what did she have left?

Memories stirred in Bara’s sluggish mind, oddities from her childhood.

She had been a slow child, slow to speak and slow to understand what others said to her. One of her earliest memories was of Winnie holding her on his lap and trying to talk about a doll she held. She had clutched the doll, afraid he would take it, but she could make no sense of what he was saying. Had her being slow made it easier for them to keep people from counting months and knowing how old she was?

They had moved to Atlanta the summer before she turned five. Her mother had taken her to nursery school the week after her fifth birthday and tried to tell Miss Collins that Bara was four. Bara had raised indignant eyes and said, “No. I had my birthday, remember? I am five!”

Her mother had laughed in that fake way she did when she was embarrassed. “I guess you are. I forgot.”

“Shouldn’t she go to kindergarten?” Miss Collins had whispered.

“Not this year,” her mother had whispered back. “Don’t mention how old she is to the other children. Pretend she is four.”

“But she is so tall.”

“Yes, but we feel it better to hold her back a year.”

“You were always holding me back,” Bara muttered. The hot August sun poured down on the Jag, but she drove aimlessly with her windows down, chilled to the soul.

During her entire school career, Nettie had told her to tell people she was a year younger than she was, although Bara had towered over her classmates until adolescence. Her entire school experience had been colored by the fact that she knew she was older than the others, but nobody else knew. She had excelled in school, but had accepted that it was because she was older—that she must be, in some way, less intelligent than people her own age.

And yet, she’d always made better grades than Art, and her test scores were higher in high school, as well. When Winnie urged him to study harder, or when he and Bara quarreled—which was often, since he tended to ignore Bara and she followed him like a shadow until he got angry and sent her away—Art would shout things like, “Life was better before you ruined it!” Or “Why did you have to come and mess everything up?” He would have been four when she was born. Had he been aware of the stress that preceded her birth?

Nettie never put candles on Bara’s birthday cakes. Art had candles, but Bara’s cakes were elaborately decorated instead. Nettie would explain, “I didn’t want to ruin the pretty icing with candles.” Because the cakes were so beautiful, Bara had felt that cakes with candles were inferior. But had Nettie simply been protecting her own Buckhead reputation?

Nettie and Winnie had quarreled when Bara wanted to get a driver’s license the week of her sixteenth birthday. “It’s time to stop this silliness,” Winnie had shouted.

“We don’t want the boys in her class to know she’s older than they are,” Nettie replied, “and none of them can drive yet. Do you want her driving boys all over town?”

Winnie had given in and stomped off to his library—increasingly his refuge from the tantrums Nettie threw at home but never in public. Nettie had warned Bara, “Don’t ever tell boys you are older, honey. Men don’t like older women.”

“Men don’t like ________” One of the unvarying tenets of her mother’s universe. The other was “You’ll never get married if you __________” Marriage was the end-all and be-all of a girl’s life.

“Your marriage wasn’t so hot,” Bara stormed as she prowled the streets of Buckhead. “But what man, besides Winnie, liked you? Who was he, dammit?”

Who would be likely to know?

Rita Louise had been Nettie’s best friend. She would know. But would she tell what she knew after a lifetime of covering up? Better save her for later.

Uncle Scotty ought to know. He was Nettie’s brother, and he hadn’t left Atlanta during the war. He had spent the war down at Fort Gillem, helping direct supplies to troops from the quartermaster depot.

He hadn’t left Atlanta.

That’s what she was looking for, wasn’t it? A man who had been home while Winnie was overseas. But not Uncle Scotty. Not his own sister.

What about Father John? Or Oscar Anderson?

Gall rose in Bara’s throat as she considered Oscar. Nettie had known him all her life, but if Oscar were Bara’s father, he’d be Payne’s grandfather, as well as Hamilton’s. Surely Oscar would never have let them marry and produce Chip if that were the case.

If he had known.

Nettie was a private person. Had she told the father of her child that she was pregnant?

Bara felt nauseated just thinking those thoughts. Her thoughts rattled along like a car with poor shocks on a red dirt road. Hadn’t Oscar done something in the war? Seemed like he had. He was a Quaker and didn’t fight, but wasn’t he in the ambulance corps? Bara remembered several times when he’d flown off to some sort of reunion. She wasn’t clear what the corps was, or where and when Oscar might have been part of it, but Ann Rose or Hamilton might know.

What about Father John? Bara didn’t know whether he’d been in the war or stayed to serve his congregation. He’d had dark eyes, like hers, and hair like wet tar. He wasn’t any taller than she, but Nettie had been tall. That could be where her height had come from.

“Don’t be silly,” she told herself. “John Phipps was a priest. Surely Mother—”

The thought revolted her. Yet Nettie had been very religious. And there were dozens if not hundreds of stories about women who fell in love with their minister or priest—especially when the women were particularly lonely and vulnerable.

Father John had been a charismatic man. Could he have been lonely, too? Of course he could, married to the original ice maiden. Nobody in Buckhead had been surprised that Rita Louise had no children. Virgin births happen so seldom.

So Father John was a definite possibility, and Oscar could be. If not them, then who?

Her tanned arm resting on the steering wheel sent her thoughts jolting along in another direction. What if her father had been black? She tanned much darker than either of her parents. Her mother would never have willingly slept with a black man, but what if she had been raped? Those were wild days in Atlanta. Was that the cause of her mother’s extreme racism in later years? And the reason for her apparent dislike of her daughter? It would certainly explain Winnie’s hustling Nettie out of town.

If that were so, Bara would probably never know who her father was. She needed to know
something
.

She checked her watch. It was nearly noon. Uncle Scotty visited Aunt Eloise each morning after a round of golf. He would probably still be at the nursing home. She’d take him to lunch on some of Winnie’s money. Scotty wouldn’t get a nap this afternoon until Bara had tried to make him tell her what she wanted to know.

She pulled into the parking lot of the nursing home and opened her door before she switched off the car. With long, quick strides she hurried into the building and scrawled her name on the sign-in sheet at the desk.

She didn’t visit often, but she was known to the aides who had been there awhile. One of them gave her a bright smile and said, “We are feeling pretty good today!”

Bara gave her a withering look. “I’m glad you are and hope Aunt Eloise is. I personally feel like hell. Is she still in the same room?”

The aide tossed her head. “Of course.” As Bara hurried away, she heard the aide say to another, “We certainly are snotty today, aren’t we?”

Bara checked her step for an instant, but the remark wasn’t worth a detour in her agenda. She strode down the hall and into her aunt’s room.

One glance showed her that Scotty was not there. Another glance revealed that Eloise was sneaking chocolate behind her hand. Eloise was diabetic. Scotty knew she wasn’t supposed to have candy, but he brought a bar in from time to time because he knew she loved it.

Bara was backing out to inform a nurse when Eloise looked up and exclaimed, “A visitor. How nice!”

Eloise had never been a pretty woman. She had a plump, pink face with a round little chin stuck on like an afterthought, and her hair was constantly either too tight from a new perm or bedraggled like it needed one. No hairdresser had ever gotten Eloise Payne’s hair styled well. But she was a fluttery, soft woman, the opposite of Nettie’s stout rigidity. She had been a great success as a first-grade teacher, and Bara, as a child, had found her a lot more comforting than her mother. As an adult, Bara was still fond of her.

“Hello, Aunt Eloise. It’s a gorgeous day outside.”

Eloise had a private room with a view. Winnie had seen to that. Her chair was by the window, and if she had chosen to look, she could have seen the Atlanta skyline softened by smog. Instead, her attention was on the television news.

Since she was having a good day, only a tenseness in her posture and an anxious shadow behind her eyes betrayed her knowledge that something was terribly wrong with her and she was not sure what it was. On bad days, her eyes were vague and bewildered.

She gestured to the other chair. “Have a seat, dear. How nice of you to come.”

It was obvious she didn’t have a clue who Bara might be or where either one of them was, but one of the unfathomable twists of her dementia was that although memory had gone, her courtesy remained.

Do you know who my daddy was?
Bara wanted to beg, but she bit back the words and forced herself to take a deep breath before speaking. No point in upsetting the poor woman. She would only retreat into confusion. Bara smiled and tried to put some enthusiasm into her words. “Aunt Eloise, it’s Bara. Nettie’s daughter.”

“I know who you are, dear.”

Was that true? Early in her Alzheimer’s, Aunt Eloise had learned to lie convincingly.

Bara considered.

Eloise’s memory of the distant past was generally better than her memory of anything in the past twenty years, and she and Scotty had been married before the war. Murdoch was a much-delayed (and, in Bara’s opinion, a most dubious) blessing in their marriage. Could a kernel of memory lurking in Eloise’s distressed mind be dredged up by conversation?

“You’ve known me all my life. That’s why I came to see you.” Bara put one hand on Eloise’s soft, plump one. “I’ve found something of Winnie’s that puzzles me. A war medal.”

Eloise picked at her blue robe nervously, required to take a test she had not prepared for. “The war’s over, isn’t it, dear? I don’t know why everybody still goes on about it.” Eloise had always regretted the way Atlanta forgot Scotty’s contribution to the war effort and lionized Winnie’s.

“I don’t want to go on about the war,” Bara assured her, “but I would like to know about Winnie’s medals. I want to frame them for Chip.”

“Chip?” Eloise’s memory had stopped processing new data before Chip’s birth. At the moment, she was more interested in a commercial featuring bears bragging on toilet paper.

“My grandson.” Bara moved quickly to what she wanted to know. “I read the citation that came with one of Winnie’s medals, and it said Winnie came home from the war in February. Do you remember exactly when he came home?”

When Eloise paused, Bara thought it was hopeless. Eloise, however, had only been waiting until the bears had finished touting their toilet paper. She nodded. “Oh my, yes. George Washington’s Birthday. Nettie had planned a big do to welcome him home, and all her decorations and desserts had a cherry theme. But it turned out to be a terrible day.”