Please Remember This (18 page)

“Sometimes those are the only things you can let yourself miss,” Ned said softly.

She nodded. “After my grandfather died and I had cleared out the house, if I couldn’t find something, I would picture where it was in the old house and I’d think I’d run over and get it, the new people wouldn’t mind … not that it was there, of course.”

“Did you find what you were looking for?” Phil asked.

Ned tried not to shake his head. Phil had completely missed Tess’s point.

It was after eight when they were finished with the contents of the three trunks. Tess needed a ride back to town, but Ned still had to close up the schoolhouse and check at the site, so of course Phil was the one who drove her back. Of course.

Phil had taken the truck so that he could drop off the leather and textiles at the restaurant. But Ned had kept one tray behind, the one with Eveline Lanier’s sewing supplies.

He had said that he would do no preservation while the ground was open. It was just too time-consuming. Stabilize the artifacts now; preserve them for exhibition later.

The empty wooden spools, which must have once held cotton thread, he would have to put in underwater storage. You couldn’t preserve wood overnight. But the silk could be washed, and the pins and needles could be dried and counted. It was exactly the sort of thing he had sworn to Dr. Matt that he wouldn’t do—stay up all night to do something that could be done next year. But this was different.

This was for Tess.

Professionally, Ned accepted a conventional view of time. Time was a simple line, always moving forward. The past was over, the future hadn’t yet happened. That was it.

But outside his profession, Ned was willing to accept—even if it had never happened to him—that for some people, there were moments when time’s simple line doubled back on itself, twisting and knotting.

He suspected that something like that had happened to Tess by the rinsing table outside the schoolhouse. She hadn’t imagined Eveline’s regret. She had actually experienced it right along with Eveline. He didn’t understand how such things happened or why, but he believed that they could.

Not that he was going to talk to her about it. She wouldn’t have been any more receptive to the idea than Phil would have been. Her softly curling hair and rose-gold coloring might give her an unearthly glow, but she was as relentless an empiricist as Phil. She lived in the here and now. She believed in the material world, she adored it, she treasured its beauties.

She couldn’t have been more different from Nina Lane, who, for all her ability to describe the physical world, viewed it as a gateway to something richer.

By 3 A.M. the wash water gushing through the brilliantly colored silk threads was running clear, and all the metal objects were dried and arranged on a velvet-lined jewelry tray. The silk threads were still too wet to be moved, but the pins, the needles, the scissors, and the hoop, he was giving them to Tess.

He went home, showered, did some research, and waited for morning. It was Saturday and Tess didn’t open until eight, but he figured she would be there long before that. So he went over to the Old Courthouse to work, occasionally checking out the window for lights at the Lanier Building. When they went on, he crossed the street. Through the tall, arched windows he could see Tess moving around the main part of the room, pushing in chairs and straightening the doilies she kept on the tables. She was wearing another one of those long dresses, only this was a jumper. Underneath it she had on a white blouse with a high collar. Except for her glorious spill of hair, she looked like an Edwardian schoolteacher.

He rapped lightly on the glass. She saw him and hurried over. As he waited for her to unlock the door, he noticed that the little blank books weren’t on the tables anymore.

“I’m so happy to see you,” she said as soon as the door was open. “I wanted to thank you for yesterday … for having Phil call me. I wouldn’t have missed that for the world.”

“I’m glad you could be there.”

“I only wished I’d looked at the clothes more carefully, how they were put together. I don’t suppose you remember if the ruched trim on the periwinkle dress was piped or not?”

“I wouldn’t know how to answer that even if I was looking right at it. But here”—he held out the jewelry tray—”I brought Eveline’s needles and such.”

She leaned forward to examine them more closely. Her hair brushed against his arm. “They look so
new! What a good job you did. Are you going to put them in the museum?”

He had certainly made a hash of this presentation. “No. They’re for you.”

She still didn’t understand. “The museum isn’t ready for them? Do you want me to display them in here until then?”

Ned had sent some of the best dishes for Wyatt and Gabe to put on display at the restaurant. Eventually they would be returned to the collection, but in the meantime, it was a way of thanking the two men for the use of their freezer.

That was temporary. This was not. “You can do whatever you want with them. I kept those already threaded needles—they’ll be good for the museum—but the rest is for you. It belonged to your something-great-grandmother. Now it’s yours.”

She was surprised. “Why? I thought—”

He knew what she thought. Every piece of publicity had said that the collection would be preserved intact. Nothing would be given away or sold. He shrugged. “You shouldn’t believe everything you read.”

“But, Ned—” She wasn’t going to accept them.

“Didn’t your moth—your grandmother raise you to accept gifts graciously?”

“Actually not.” Her smile was in her eyes. “My grandparents were so tense about material things that it was hard for them to be gracious. But I guess I don’t have their excuse, so I’ll try to do better. Thank you.”

How could he have ever thought her eyes were
simply blue? A green halo shimmered around the iris. “You’re welcome.”

He wished he could do more for her, he liked her, he wanted her life to be perfect, but he couldn’t think of anything that she needed.

She took the tray over to one of the glass-fronted cabinets. She rearranged a few things, set the tray inside, and then, after closing the door, locked the cabinet and took the key out. “Can I get you some coffee?”

“Sure. Anything.”

“Caffeine or not?”

“Definitely caffeine.” He followed her to the counter and watched her work. “Did you find it odd that all the yard goods were in Marie’s trunk and, if you’re right about the colors, that the fabrics were clearly to have clothes made for her, not Eveline?”

This was the other reason he had come, the other thing he had for her. It wasn’t a needle or an artifact; it was a story, an explanation.

She handed him one of her jade-green mugs. It was filled with something frothy and caramel-colored. “I am right about the colors, and what’s the surprise about the daughter being more interested in new clothes than the mother?”

Ned had three younger sisters. No one had to tell him anything about a teenage girl’s desire for new clothes. “Yes, but the mother was pregnant.”

He didn’t remember Carolyn being pregnant with Caitlin, but he did have memories of the time before Emma’s and Brittany’s births. They had been born at different times of the year, and he could remember
Carolyn borrowing maternity clothes from her friends.

But from whom on board the
Western Settler
could the mother of Herbert Lanier have borrowed clothes? She couldn’t have counted on finding a Lady Madonna maternity-wear specialty shop in Nebraska Territory.

“So,” he added, “Eveline would have needed new garments. The clothes in her trunk weren’t maternity gowns. But all the uncut fabric was for Marie.”

“Oh.” That made Tess pause. “There might be more trunks.”

“Of course there might be. There’s no question about that. But I can’t help wondering if it really was Eveline who was pregnant.”

Her eyebrows went up. “You’re thinking it might have been Marie?”

He had had all night to work this out. “Why would a thirty-six-year-old pregnant woman set out on a steamboat trip up the Mississippi, much less on a tour of the frontier? It doesn’t matter how skilled a midwife you’ve got traveling with you, it’s still a dumb thing to do. But if you’re hiding an unmarried daughter’s pregnancy, and you’re going to go home and pass the baby off as yours, what better? We know they planned to spend the summer in St. Louis, but they may have gotten off there and realized that they knew too many people, so they moved on. The Picard family document talks about how Marie was ‘sickly’ all fall and no one saw much of her.”

Tess nodded. She could see that that made sense. “It would explain why the baby things were in her
trunk. Then it’s more like what the new edition of
The Riverboat Fragment
is suggesting. That the daughter, not the mother, was pregnant.”

Ned nodded. “In fact, I don’t think I would have put all these pieces together if Nina Lane hadn’t done it first.”

Tess frowned. “But she was just making it up, wasn’t she? She couldn’t have known, could she? She didn’t know anything about Eveline’s dresses or the fabric or what trunk the baby things were in.”

“Define ‘know.’ We don’t
know
anything either, but her intuition was probably extraordinarily powerful.”

“Or it was a lucky guess.” Tess went back to straightening up the room.

“True.” Or Nina could have flat-out, absolutely known in the only way a person could have. Marie had told her.

But that wasn’t the sort of thing you said to Tess Lanier.

“Have you ever wondered,” he asked instead, “why these people—the Laniers, the Ravenals, the Picards—why they stopped practicing Catholicism?”

“They were Catholic?” Tess was surprised. Then she shook her head. “Oh, goodness, of course they were. They were French; they were from New Orleans. I guess it would have been odd if they weren’t Catholic.”

“And they were—enough church records in New Orleans survived to make that clear. But the cemetery outside town where Marie is buried, that’s not church-consecrated ground.”

“Maybe there weren’t any priests around.”

Ned shook his head. He had looked all this up.
“There was a bishop in Leavenworth—he baptized Herbert—and a couple of priests were doing missionary work with the Pottawatomie Indians along the Kaw. Marie died in January. It was cold. There would have been time to get her to Leavenworth.”

“What’s your point? What do you think this means?”

He took a breath. “I think Marie Lanier committed suicide and enough people in town knew it, so there was no way of getting a Catholic priest to bury her in consecrated ground.”

Tess had been wiping the service counter. She stopped. “She committed suicide? So you think she might have been depressed. Or manic. Do you think Eveline’s laudanum was likely for Marie?”

“It’s very speculative.” By which he, of course, meant yes.

“She had enough of a pattern of erratic behavior that her mother traveled with sedatives, she had a baby out of wedlock whom someone else cared for, and then three months later, probably in a state of postpartum depression, she killed herself. You know whose story that is, don’t you?”

He did. Of course he did. It was Nina Lane’s.

Chapter 11

 

T
here was a strong genetic component of bipolar illness, Tess knew that. And she also knew that it was no accident that she had gotten her college degree in something as close to psychiatry as her artistic talents would allow. She had needed to diagnose herself. She had needed to be sure that she wasn’t manic-depressive, that she wasn’t her mother.

And she wasn’t. She knew that with all her being. But if Nina Lane had come to Kansas looking for the source of her madness, she might have found it in Marie Lanier.

Had Marie given Nina a map? Had she made suicide seem possible?

The Gaithers family had begun their journey in Cincinnati and thus had not been with us on the
Cypress Princess.
They had relatives in Nebraska Territory, and the family was to join that household until they could afford an establishment of their own.

Mrs. Gaithers’s manner was more proud and boastful than her station in life seemed to warrant. Among her household possessions entrusted
to the hold of the
Western Settler
was a set of blue-and-white dishes. She spoke of these dishes often and several times wished that they could be brought up from the hold so that we other ladies could admire them. They would be, she told us repeatedly, the finest set of dishes in Nebraska Territory. Her pride in this china was tedious, and her wailings over their eventual loss seemed, at the time, undignified.

Following the wreck, the family boarded another westbound steamboat after only a single night ashore, and my female relation and I did not regret their departure.

One’s own experience of frontier life, however, makes one more forgiving. Mrs. Gaithers may have been a reluctant pilgrim, dreading the hardships of the frontier. On board the
Western Settler,
we talked about the settlers’ future, using the words “household” and “establishment” as if they signified the spacious dwellings and ample household staff that make familial hospitality a gracious pleasure. At the time, we knew that such language exaggerated, but our ignorance left us innocent of the exaggeration’s extent. Mrs. Gaithers was likely to be moving into a tent next to her sister-in-law’s one-room sod cabin. The blue-and-white dishes would, one now understands, elevate her from the dreary grimness of the frontier’s daily routine.

One does now occasionally wonder about the fate of this unhappy woman. No longer the owner of the finest set of dishes in Nebraska
Territory, she arrived at her new home without any household or personal belongings at all.

Mrs. Louis Lanier (Eveline Roget),
The Wreck of the Western Settler,
privately printed, 1879

 

Tess reread the little booklet that Eveline Lanier had written. She never mentioned Marie by name; she never even specified that the “female relation” she was traveling with was her daughter. How cold-natured that made her sound. But perhaps the opposite was true. If Marie had committed suicide, perhaps Eveline could not speak or write about her even twenty years later. The memories were too painful. Tess’s own grandmother had almost never talked about Nina, her suicidal daughter.

Eveline and Marie Lanier had been by far the wealthiest, best-educated women on board. They must have seemed smug and snobbish to the other passengers. But Eveline might well have been on a desperate journey to save her daughter from social disgrace. And if Marie had been anything like Nina Lane, this would not have been the first time she had tormented her mother with her incomprehensible behavior.

Had Eveline been hopeful? Had she persuaded herself that this would be the last time her daughter would bewilder and enrage her? Did she believe that they could return to New Orleans once the baby was born and that all would be well? Or did she suspect the truth? That this turmoil would only end in death.

Sewing money into the hem of a petticoat, as Eveline
had done, was not the act of a confident, affluent person. Confident, affluent people trust that whatever happens can be fixed. Perhaps hiding the money had been the slave Octavia’s idea; it was an act characteristic of someone who felt powerless. Perhaps it was Eveline’s own idea, suggesting that she was not nearly as assured about her good fortune as she appeared to be.

Eveline Lanier had lost her daughter, her maid, and her religion. The loss of a tin box full of sewing supplies should have been insignificant, but as Tess slipped her fingers in the gold scissors’ two small ring handles, she knew that these needles and pins, these strands of silk, had been missed.

At the Lanier Building, Tess had a set of eight ivory linen napkins for sale, the fabric beautifully woven, but without any adornment. So she took them home with her, traced with a water-soluble marker an
R
on the corner of each, and since she couldn’t imagine what Ned would do with a set of eight monogrammed ivory linen napkins—or rather, she could imagine what he would do with them, which was to use them to dry metal artifacts from the boat—she added a smaller C and
S
on either side of the
R.
Carolyn Shelby Ravenal.

She selected an ivory floss from her own collection and cut lengths, using Eveline Lanier’s gold-plated scissors. She threaded six of Eveline’s needles, carefully stowing the needles in a piece of scrap cloth and wrapping the thread around the needles in a neat figure eight, just as Eveline had done. She fitted one of the napkins into Eveline’s metal embroidery hoop.

She would cover the letters with a satin stitch, and then, because there had also been French knots on the piece Eveline had been working on, she would accent the curves of the letters with a floral-like spray of French knots.

This project did not make sense. It was the first week of December, the start of the Christmas season. She was now staying open late on weeknights, but her high school employees were busy with exams and couldn’t work many extra hours. If she was going to take any time for needlework, she should be making clothes for herself. There was nothing at Kmart she wanted to wear, she couldn’t see when she would get into Kansas City to shop, and she was freezing. Her California wardrobe was inadequate for a Kansas winter.

But she wanted to work with Eveline’s needles.

Tess finished the first napkin and unclamped it from the hoop, brushing off a few stray threads. She would iron it in the morning. She picked up the second napkin and began to fit it in the hoop.

This was such a simple project for her. She was surprised at how much she was enjoying it. Would it have made Eveline happy to know that her needles and scissors had been found and were being used?

Tess brought the threaded needle up through the fabric, making the first stitch. For a moment it felt as if she and Eveline were working together; the needle was sliding in and out of the fabric so easily and the thread was lying so smoothly because there were two women at work.

Why do you cut your threads short? You are having to change needles so often.

The thread gets less twisted,
Tess started to explain.
The—

Wait a second. What kind of crazy thought was that? Tess jabbed the needle into the linen and set the hoop aside. She had been working too long. She supposed there were people who believed in ghosts and that the unseen could intervene in daily life. But even they didn’t think that the dead showed up to help you with your satin stitch. Or to complain about how you threaded your needle.

Another few evenings’ work and the first two napkins were finished. Tess took them to the Lanier Building, cleared off a shelf in one of the glass-fronted cases, and displayed the napkins with a small notice: “Embroidery worked on a hoop and with needles salvaged from the
Western Settler.”
Without saying a word to Carolyn, she then added, “Napkins property of Carolyn Shelby Ravenal.”

Barely two hours later Carolyn shoved open the door of the Lanier Building. “What is all this about napkins, Tess?”

“I actually thought you would be here sooner.”

“I would have, but I was in the middle of getting a permanent, and if I had left earlier, my hair would have all fried off. Now stop talking and show me what you have gone and done.”

Tess showed her the napkins. “I thought you would like them.”

“I adore them, but, Tess, really, this is out of the question. I can’t have you doing this for me.”

“It was only incidentally for you,” Tess said honestly. “I wanted to work with the needles and the hoop, and I would have made something for Ned,
but he just didn’t seem like a hand-embroidered-monogram sort of guy.”

“You’re right on that count. He is your basic-black laundry-marker type. Of course, you could have made them for Phil, you know.”

“For Phil?” That had never occurred to her. Why would she have made something for Phil?

Carolyn was looking at her questioningly.

Oh, God. Phil. Carolyn was surprised that she hadn’t thought to make something for Phil.

One of the first things Tess had noticed when she came back to Kansas last summer was how handsome Phil Ravenal was. She had given the matter virtually no thought since.

But what would their relationship look like to other people? Tess saw him two or three times a day; he was always in and out of the Lanier Building. When people invited her over to their homes on Sunday evenings, they usually included him, and he would offer to pick her up. Sometimes she accepted a ride from him, sometimes she didn’t. It depended on what part of town they were going to.

But unless other people arranged it, they rarely saw each other outside the Lanier Building. Only once had they been out on what could have been called a date—when he took her to The Cypress Princess for dinner during her first full week in town.

They weren’t close. She had never asked him about his childhood or his years with the congressman in Washington, D.C. She had never told him about taking care of her grandparents; she had never told him what it had been like to suddenly get so much money; she had never told him about Gordon Winsler
needing to turn the lights off when he had made love to her.

Throughout the rest of the day, Tess was suddenly aware of the number of people who would stop by and expect her to know Phil’s whereabouts.

“I see Phil’s car is not at the courthouse. Do you know where he is?”

She wished she didn’t. She wished she could stare blankly.
Why would you think that I would know?
But, in fact, she did know. “He had meetings in Kansas City for most of the day. But leave a message at the courthouse if you need to talk to him. You know he’ll check his machine whenever he can.”

Did that make her his girlfriend? Wasn’t it simply one local businessperson helping out another? Tess had a feeling that in this town, “girlfriend” was the answer.

But this wasn’t a question for the town to answer. This was her business. Did she want to be Phil Lanier’s girlfriend?

She wasn’t sure.

She had put up a Christmas tree in the Lanier Building, which necessitated rearranging the furniture. One of the leather-covered love seats now sat under a front window, and late in the afternoon on the day that Carolyn had come in to see the napkins, Tess was sitting there, working on the third napkin, taking advantage of the last of the daylight. Sasha and her cousin, needing Christmas money, were both working the counter. Tess was going to go home as soon as she finished this spray of French knots. Of course, she had said that after the last four sprays.
Needlework was like that. You could never put it down.

She was starting on the sixth spray—just this one, just this one more—when the big glass door opened and Phil walked in, followed by Ned.

“What’s all this about the napkins you’re making for Mom?” Phil unbuttoned his gray wool overcoat as he spoke. “She’s thrilled.”

“And it was a good joke,” Ned added, “not telling her. People are enjoying that as much as the napkins.”

“I’m glad I can add to the local entertainment scene.” Tess watched the brothers cross the room to join her.

There was no question that Phil was the more conventionally handsome. He was taller; his features were more even; his clothes fit him better, he carried himself with more confidence.

But physically he did nothing for Tess. She wasn’t sure why, she had never thought about it—which was pretty revealing—but she couldn’t imagine him in bed. He was so careful and controlled. Did he ever lose himself in something, even sex?

Ned, on the other hand, although he often seemed distracted in conversation, was completely absorbed when he was doing something. Tess had seen him drive a bulldozer; she had seen him count a bucketful of nineteenth-century hinges. He had no trouble losing himself in an activity. Ned’s problem was finding himself again when it was time to stop.

Which certainly made Ned sound like a better bet in bed … not that she had been thinking about him in that way either.

She got the two finished napkins out of the glass-fronted
case. Both men tried to be appreciative, but a healthy masculine ignorance underlay their praise.

“Neither one of you has a clue what you’re talking about,” she said, laughing.

“You may be right about that,” Phil admitted smoothly. “But we aren’t such idiots that we don’t know when someone is doing something nice for our mother.”

“I wanted to make them for Ned—”

“For me?” Ned was startled. “For
me?”

“—but I was afraid he would put them in a drawer and they’d never see the light of day again, or he would have used them for dish towels.”

“I wouldn’t have done
that,”
he protested. “But the drawer thing would be a good bet. I’m not giving a whole lot of dinner parties these days.” He passed the napkin back to her. “But the idea that you did it for Mom … I don’t know … I like that a lot.”

She felt the brush of his hand against hers when he handed her the napkin. “That’s what I was hoping.”

“What was it like using nineteenth-century needles?” he asked. “Could you tell any difference?”