I Still Dream About You: A Novel (28 page)

F
ORTUNATELY THE OPEN HOUSE WENT WELL. THE ATTENDEES
were mostly neighbors and old friends of the Daltons who were curious to see it again. They all had fond memories of being at Crestview at one time or another when they were children. Maggie heard a lot of stories about Edward Crocker from the older ones who had met him. By all accounts, he’d been a shy man but well liked. One older woman shook her head and smiled. “My mother said every girl in Birmingham had high hopes of becoming Mrs. Edward Crocker, but the sly fox was never caught. He was one of those confirmed bachelors, not that he didn’t like the ladies. Mother said he was very good friends with a lot of the married ladies in town. And, of course, he absolutely adored his sister, Edwina. They say that no matter how busy he was, every June, without fail, Edward sailed to Europe and spent three months visiting Edwina at her home in London.”

Later, an older man in a wheelchair came through Crestview and said he had grown up in a house down the hill. He remembered Edward Crocker as being very fond of children. He said when he was boy, Mr. Crocker would let him and all his brothers and sisters ride their ponies all over the property and sent them wonderful
presents every Christmas. The more Maggie heard about Edward that day, the more curious she became.

So after everybody left, she went back to the library and looked at the portrait again. This time, she realized what it was about his eyes that she hadn’t noticed before. There was a strange sadness there, almost as if he was longing for something he couldn’t have. Maggie related to that. “But what was it?” she wondered. Edward Crocker had everything in the world a man could want: money and power and Crestview. Even so, he looked lonely. He had not been an only child. He had a sister, so she wondered
who
it was he was lonely for. Had he been disappointed in love? Had someone broken his heart?

The longer she looked at his face, the more she wished she could have known him.

E
VERY AFTERNOON, AFTER A HARD DAY’S WORK RUNNING THE FAMILY
business, Edward Crocker, like his father, Angus, before him, would sit out on the stone terrace until all the lights of downtown Birmingham started to come on one by one, sparkling like liquid jewels that twinkled and danced for as far as the eye could see. He sat and watched the cars as they snaked around the mountain like a chain of moving tiny glowing rubies, and it always pleased him. He had no art in the home, except the oil portrait over the mantel in the library, but unlike his father, Edward loved music and, when he entertained, would often hire a string quartet to play out on the terrace. On those summer nights, people said they could hear the faint sound of music playing all the way down the mountain and into the valley below.

Crestview was the only home Edward had ever known, and as a young boy, he had played among the workers and stonemasons his father had hired to build it. He was happy on the mountain. There was, of course, that one great secret of his life, but as hard as it was to bear, he did have sister, Edwina, in London, and he had Crestview. And no matter how much noise and hustle and bustle in the city below, it was always quiet that high up on the mountain. All that could be heard was the far-off train whistle and the night birds in his vast gardens.

When his father, Angus Crocker, passed away at ninety-two, his last wishes were that he be taken back home and buried in Scotland. But having been raised in Alabama, Edward wanted to be buried at Crestview. He loved his home, and when he was out of town, he left standing instructions: “The home is to be lit with electric light from sundown to sunup, and the gardens are to be maintained per my instructions.”

Twice a year, Edward opened up his home and gardens to all of his employees and always had presents for the children. A shy man, he observed the festivities from a chair in the attic. It had been very pleasant to watch all the children playing in the gardens below.

In 1928, little Ethel Louise Tatum, long before she became Ethel Clipp, had been taken up to Crestview for a Christmas party and, at one point, had looked up and waved at the man in the upstairs window, and he had waved back. But she didn’t remember it. The only thing she remembered was the present she received. All the boys got toy trains, and the girls were given dolls. She would rather have had the train; only eight years old and already a malcontent.

L
ATER AS
M
AGGIE
walked around Crestview turning off lights and closing all the drapes, Babs Bingington was across town (recuperating from yet another face-lift) sitting up in her bed, with her head wrapped in bandages, and squinting at her laptop computer, reading an email from the spy she had sent to Maggie’s open house. And if she could have she would have smiled.

“No principals. Just lookie-loos and neighbors.”

Just as Babs had thought. That old dog of a house would never sell; certainly not before Christmas. She didn’t have to do a thing now. She’d wait and call the lawyer in New York after the first of the year with another proposal he’d be a fool to turn down.

T
HE NEXT MORNING
, some eighty years after her first visit to Crestview, Ethel Clipp still had complaints. When Maggie came in the
door, she started in: “I am so upset, I could just have a flying fit. You are not going to believe this.”

“What?”

“Saturday, I went to the loveliest wedding over at the Church of the Advent, and every one of the bridesmaids had tattoos and so did the bride. Can you believe it? Pretty young blond girls with tattoos. In my day, nice girls wouldn’t even date a boy who had a tattoo. What are they thinking? And to make matters worse, the groom had a head full of dreadlocks, and he isn’t even black. Can you imagine what the world is going to be like fifty years from now? A bunch of old ladies sitting around playing bridge with tattoos all over their big fat arms. I mean, Jesus Christ, who wants a grandmother with a tattoo? And I remember when boys used to be clean-cut.”

“Me too,” said Brenda.

“Now they all want to look scruffy. It was that TV show,
Miami Vice
, that did it. Since then, nobody shaves anymore. I swear to God, people are so stupid. Something becomes a fad, and everybody does it. What happened to the individual? I wouldn’t be surprised if a show about nudists was a hit, and the next day, everybody in America stopped wearing clothes.”

Brenda laughed. “Well, if that happened, I sure don’t want to see it. I don’t even like to look at myself naked, much less strangers.”

Ethel made a face. “I’ll tell you one damn thing. If that happens, and people start jogging in the nude with their altogethers dangling in the wind, I’m out of here.”

T
HANKSGIVING CAME AND WENT, AND STILL NO SALE OF CRESTVIEW
. There were a few people that seemed interested, but nothing concrete. But every day that went by, sitting in the house, looking at his portrait, Maggie became more and more intrigued with Edward Crocker. Not having a plan for the future or watching the news, Maggie was finding out that between showings at Crestview, she had a lot of free time on her hands with nothing to do. Finally, one afternoon, she went down to the Birmingham Public Library and began doing a little research on Edward Crocker. She started looking up old newspaper articles on microfilm.

Most of the coverage was about business, but she found a few mentions of Edward in several articles. An interesting one came from the
Birmingham News
, in 1933.

Edward looked small and somewhat delicate in his photographs, but he was no weakling where business was concerned. Maggie read accounts of his stance in the thirties against the large influx of people who had been sent to Alabama to try to infiltrate and unionize his workers. In 1932, Edward had been photographed standing in front of one of his mines, holding a rifle, and underneath, he was quoted:

From what she read, he seemed to have been a tough but fair man.

Most of Edward’s workers were poor sharecroppers who had
come to town looking for work, or immigrant Greeks, Italians, or Poles who had ridden steerage to get there and had been assured a chance to move up in the company if they worked hard enough. All the workers seemed to like and respect him. As Maggie read on, she saw that many articles had been written about his business affairs, but almost nothing about Edward’s social life. She started looking in some old society columns for any mention, and luckily, she was able to find a few. One, from the
Birmingham News
on June 19, 1932, was especially intriguing.

And from the same newspaper in 1933:

The more Maggie read, the more she gleaned that Edward had been unusually devoted to his sister and had left the business he seemed to love to spend three months in London with her every year. But what red-blooded man would devote so much time to his sister? People who visited Crestview had remarked that the only photographs he kept in his bedroom were of his sister. In an interview, he had once said, “My sister is my dearest friend and best companion.” One article quoted his sister, Edwina, as having said to a London
Times
reporter, “My brother is as fine a man as any on this earth; there is none closer and dearer to me than my own beloved brother, Edward; our hearts and minds think as one.”