Summer in the South (13 page)

“I guess that explains why you wear gloves when you garden,” Ava said, and Clara chuckled, bending above a pot of sweet peas and marigolds. Ava trailed behind her, working up the courage to speak. There was so much she wanted to ask about Charlie, and it had occurred to her that Clara might be willing to talk, but now that she was here, she wasn’t sure how to start. Finally she began, blurting out portions of their strange trip to the cemetery. When she finished Clara was quiet, clipping shoots off the branches of an old gardenia. Ava knew from Clara’s silence that she had blundered, but her curiosity got the better of her. “So who was he? This Charlie Woodburn.”

Clara continued snipping, and then said quietly, “He was a man best forgotten.”

“So he was a bad person?” When Clara didn’t answer Ava said, “How did he die?”

Clara eyed her from under the brim of her straw hat. “What did Will say?”

“He says he drowned.”

“Well, then,” Clara said, sliding her shears into her basket. “I guess he drowned.”

Ava walked to the end of a row of summer squash and stood staring at Clara’s yellow cottage, visible through an opening in the tall hedge. She had been schooled in the art of listening. Clotilde had had a knack for befriending lonely people, and it was not unusual for Ava to come home for dinner to find a stranger seated at the table. Sometimes they were neighbors and sometimes they were people she had found God knows where. The thing Ava had learned listening to old people talk was that their age allowed them a particular farsightedness when it came to examining their own lives. They could look back with the benefit of regret and experience and see where they’d gone wrong. They could say, “I should have done that,” or “It was wrong that I did that,” with a cold, clear certainty.

It was for this reason that she knew that once she got Clara talking about Charlie Woodburn, she would find out the truth about who he was and what had happened to him. But it was getting Clara started that was going to be the problem.

“It was more than sixty years ago,” Ava said. “I don’t understand why no one wants to talk about it.”

“Have you ever heard the expression ‘Let sleeping dogs lie’?”

“Yes.”

“Well, down here we say ‘You don’t have to be a chicken to know a rotten egg.’ ”

Ava turned around and looked at her. “I don’t know what that means.”

“It means some things are best left forgotten.”

“But nothing ever stays forgotten. It just festers.”

“Well, I wouldn’t know about that,” Clara said, shading her eyes with one hand and gazing up at the house. “Down here, denial is always best.”

T
hat night Ava had an episode of sleep paralysis.

She was tired; she had slept poorly the night before, waking several times to find the room flooded in moonlight. On this evening she awakened three times, the last time to a feeling of dread so pervasive she couldn’t move, lying in terror, her body heavy and stiff, her mind agile and fully awake. From somewhere deep in the house she could hear a clock ticking, and she forced herself to concentrate on the steady rhythmic sound as the therapist had taught her to do, drowning out the unreal sensations with the real.

Gradually the thumping of her heart subsided. She lay on her back and stared at the moonbeams rippling across the ceiling. After a while she found that she could move her eyes, and so she did, shifting them to the left and feeling her heart clutch again in horror.

Someone was sitting in the chair beside the window, a tall, dark figure, smoking.

A
fter that, she switched on the lamp and lay in bed, rigid with terror, until falling into a restless sleep sometime after four o’clock. When she awoke again it was morning and sunlight flooded the room. In the cheerful light of day it was often difficult to remember the terror of the night before. She felt that old familiar dread, curled in her stomach like an embryo. The episode last night, coming so soon on the heels of the other nightmares, left her feeling uneasy and apprehensive. It had been years since she had suffered from nightmares and waking hallucinations, and yet now, in the space of less than three weeks, she had suffered two narcoleptic events.

She hoped it wasn’t a sign of things to come.

Twins

T
he last thing Ava wanted to do was attend a party with a group of strangers, especially one that included the “right people,” but she knew Alice Barron’s barbecue was not something she could avoid. She was very nervous, knowing she would be on display: Will Fraser’s Yankee friend come south for the summer.

“I hope I don’t get drunk and make a spectacle of myself,” Ava said.

“Whatever you do, don’t drink too much,” Will cautioned. “And don’t drink any of those local cocktail creations. Stick to beer or wine.” For some reason he seemed as nervous as she was.

He picked her up around ten o’clock on Saturday morning to take her out to Longford and then brought her back to Woodburn Hall to get ready around three o’clock. She was hot and tired, and she had a rash on her arms from the hay. They had spent the morning riding around the farm on the four-wheeler and then had a picnic lunch down by the river. Afterward they had gone swimming. It was when they were putting away the four-wheeler that the trouble began.

Sleepy from the sun and the swimming, Ava sat down in a pile of hay to wait for Will while he covered the quad with its tarp. She curled on her side and closed her eyes in the heat. She opened them later at the sound of rustling hay as he lay down beside her. He had mistaken her drowsy posture as an invitation.

She sat up. “Will. Stop.”

He lay back with his arms behind his head, gazing rigidly at the ceiling.

“You’re very sweet.”

“Don’t,” he said.

“It’s not you,” she said. “It’s me.”

When she came through the back door at Woodburn Hall, irritable and tired, Josephine looked at her as if she knew very well what Ava had been up to out at Longford. She and Fanny were sitting at the breakfast room table while Maitland leaned across the kitchen counter in front of the television set, writing down Food Channel recipes on a yellow legal pad.

“There she is!” Fanny said brightly as Ava came in.

“Hey there, Sugar,” Maitland said, glancing up briefly from his legal pad and giving her a broad wink.

“We were all getting ready to go upstairs and dress for the barbecue,” Josephine said, looking her over.

Ava pushed her damp hair off her face. “What should I wear?” she asked. “What’s the dress code?”

“Oh, I don’t know, anything that’s comfortable, I guess,” Fanny said breezily. But then she went on endlessly about how pretty sundresses were on young women and Ava, taking the hint, tried to remember if she’d brought one. She had learned, in the short time she’d been here, that no one ever came right out and spoke directly. There were always hints and vague suggestions, double entendres and Freudian slips that were meant to be taken literally so that when you carried on a conversation, you had to listen not only to what was said but also to the tone and, through slight facial expressions, to what was
implied.

Ava had a scratchy feeling in her throat. She put one finger to her nose, warding off a sudden sneeze.

“God bless you!” Fanny cried.

Josephine stared at Ava’s waist and, looking down, Ava saw several pieces of hay caught beneath the waistband of her shorts.

Behind them Maitland said, “We can’t be out late tonight. Bobby Flay’s making Cedar Plank Salmon.”

Ava sneezed again.

“Goodness!” Fanny said.

“Hay fever,” Josephine said mildly.

T
he heat of midday had begun to wane, and the sky was a violet color as they walked across the lawn to the party. Behind Alice’s large house a brick barbecue grill belched smoke, and along one end of the patio, beside the pool, a long buffet table stood covered by a white cloth. The lawn was dotted with round tables and canvas chairs
like a wedding party
, Ava thought curiously. There was a large crowd already gathered on the lawn, and as they approached several people stepped forward to greet Will and be introduced to Ava. They were very friendly and kind, but there were so many of them, and Ava knew she’d never remember all of their names. Maitland and Will went off to find drinks, and Ava let herself be shepherded from group to group by Josephine and Fanny. In spite of the crowd’s friendliness Ava was nervous; she felt herself the object of much sly and murmuring attention, and she was thankful when Will returned and thrust a glass of red wine into her hand.

He whispered in her ear, “All right?” and she said, “Yes.”

He introduced her to a group of his prep school buddies and their wives. A young woman in a faux tuxedo came around to get their drink orders.

“I’ll have another Donnie Miller,” a man in plaid shorts said.

“Me, too.”

“Make that three.”

“What’s a Donnie Miller?” Ava said.

Everyone laughed politely.

“It’s a homegrown cocktail,” the man in plaid replied. “Whipped up by one of Woodburn’s finest.” He put his arm around a sandy-haired man in wire-rim glasses.

“Hey,” the man said, stepping forward and putting his hand out to Ava. “I’m Donnie.”

“Donnie Miller?”

“That’s right.”

“Wow,” Ava said. “I’ve never met anyone with a cocktail named after them.”

“Well, in the South, if you’re lucky, you get either a cocktail or barbecue sauce named after you.”

“Here,” one of the women said, handing her glass to Ava. “Try it.”

It was very sweet and very fruity. “It’s good,” Ava said. “What’s in it?”

“Rum,” Donnie said. “Two kinds. And lemonade. Orange juice. Peach nectar.”

“I’ll have one of these,” Ava said, holding the drink up and smiling at the waitress, already forgetting Will’s warning not to drink the local cocktails.

T
he sun had begun to set, and long shadows lay across the lawn. A scent of citronella drifted on the warm air. Ava found herself entranced by the scene, the smoky globes of candlelight on the tables, the softly glowing Japanese lanterns dangling from the branches of the trees like golden fruit, the gradual fall of dusk across the landscape. It was her favorite time of day, she’d discovered, that point where day met night and everything grew still. Will had told her that as a boy he’d run barefoot through the summer dusk with the neighborhood children, scooping fireflies into mason jars and playing flashlight tag when it grew too dark to see. It had sounded so idyllic, so perfect a childhood that Ava had felt a stir of envy.

She drifted over to a group of young matrons wearing sundresses and stacked-heel sandals that showed off their lean, tanned legs, and Ava realized now why Josephine had indicated, by her tacit refusal to look at Ava’s feet, disapproval of her flat, boyish sandals. The women were friendly and close to her in age, but most had been no farther than the University of Alabama, and they talked of sorority events and babies and au pair girls until Ava, growing bored, excused herself and walked off.

In the trees, the cicadas made a pleasant chorus. Ava settled herself under a crape myrtle, where she could sip her drink and watch the crowd unnoticed.

Woodburn was broken up into social classes that resembled Victorian England. At the very top were the old families, those who had been intermarrying for generations, the first settlers who came originally from Virginia or Maryland, and before that, England or Scotland. They sent their sons to boarding school and private colleges, and presented their daughters annually at debutante balls in Nashville, Atlanta, and Birmingham.

This class was presided over by a group of sharp-eyed dowagers who Will cheerfully referred to as “the dreadnoughts,” women who could recite pedigrees and family lineages down to the smallest and most trivial detail. They could look at a child and know if he was a Robinson or a Sinclair; they kept an almost-encyclopedic memory of family traits, ailments, and characteristics—the “Whaley nose,” the “Eldridge forehead,” the “Clairmont tendency toward suicide.” Josephine, Fanny, and Alice were clearly of this class.

“So you mean they could pick you out of a lineup because of your nose?” Ava had asked Will. “Even if they didn’t know you?”

“Yes.”

“That’s fascinating.”

“I used to long to live in a big city where no one knew who I was, where I could blend in like everybody else. Be one of the masses.”

“Trust me, you wouldn’t like being one of the masses.”

Ava hadn’t liked it either. In high school she had developed a careless, impertinent facade, a biting, caustic wit that made her popular with her peers but less so with their parents, who always asked the same tired questions.

“What was your last name again?”

“Dabrowski.”

“Where are you from?”

“All over.”

“What does your father do?”

“He’s dead.”

“And your mother?”

“She’s not.”

Their questions seemed sly, cunning assaults on her carefully constructed adolescent self. She felt their disapproval but couldn’t dispute it. She didn’t much like who she was either.

How much better to be a sweet, generous girl like Margaret Stanley, with her big house and carefree, loaded parents; her mother with her furs and martinis, her father with his grass-stained golfing pants. A world of safety and ease.

The Woodburn sisters would have known that same world. It was easy to picture them as girls, pretty and spoiled, going off to dances at the country club, letting well-bred young men rest their damp hands on their narrow, corseted waists.

She could see Fanny and Josephine now, standing in a group of other dreadnoughts across the lawn. Ava sighed and sipped her Donnie Miller. It was difficult to imagine herself growing up in such a world, freed from the constraints and worries of ordinary life.

Across the lawn, Will caught her eye and raised his glass. She smiled and raised hers in return, a glimmer of hopeful optimism stirring suddenly in her chest. He looked so handsome and sincere standing there in the lamplight. Perhaps she had been wrong about him. Already she could feel herself beginning to soften.

“A
va!” She turned to find Fraser Barron advancing quickly across the grass. He was wearing a maroon vest over a white shirt, rolled at the elbows, and a pair of dark pants and leather boots. Ava was struck again by the odd way he moved, like a wind-up toy or a slightly misfiring mechanical device.

“I
love
your dress,” he said. He took her drink from her, set it down, and took her hands in his, motioning for her to spin around.

“Thanks,” she said. “I think I blew it on the shoes, though. I’m the only woman in flats.”

He crossed his arms in front of him, then rested his chin in the palm of one hand, regarding her thoughtfully. “Yes,” he said. “The shoes don’t do the dress justice.”

“And you look very—literary.”

“Do I?” he said, pleased, adjusting the rolled sleeves.

“But aren’t you hot in all those clothes?”

“No, that’s the amazing thing, you get used to it. When I first started dressing like this I used to sweat like a whore in church.” He giggled. “But over time I got used to it and now I hardly perspire at all.” He was wearing mascara and a slight smudge of eye shadow. “What’s that you’re drinking?”

“A Donnie Miller.”

“Oh, God, don’t drink that swill.” He took her glass and dashed the contents on the ground. “You need a real drink at your debut, honey, and not one of those fruity-fruity, sweety-sweet things.” He beckoned for a waitress and told her to bring two vodka martinis.

“My debut?” Ava said.

“Didn’t you know you were coming out?” Fraser made dramatic sweeping gestures at the crowd. “You’re Will Fraser’s
friend
and you’re being introduced to society. You’re having what we like to call a debut.”

“Does that make me a debutante?”

“Of course.”

“I always wondered what that felt like.”

“Well?” He raised one eyebrow rakishly. “What does it feel like?”

“I’ll let you know as soon as I finish the vodka martini.”

“See,” he said. “You’re a natural.”

L
ater, he tucked one arm under hers and propelled her across the lawn to an empty table. “I hear you’re a
fiction
writer,” he said in a low voice.

Ava smiled wryly and sipped her drink. “I’m trying.”

“Well, you’re in the right place. My God, the stories I could tell you—madness, murder, unrequited love, ghostly apparitions.”

“Ghostly apparitions?” Ava said.

He waved at someone he knew, then leaned close to her, ducking his chin like a conspirator. “They’re all haunted,” he said, “each and every house along this street. You know how it is when people have lived and died in a place for more than two centuries. Now, some of the ghosts are more pleasant than others, of course. We have, excuse me, we
had
, one of the nastier ones. The Captain.” He shivered dramatically and took a long pull from his drink. “He rode with Forrest during the War of Northern Aggression.”

“The War of Northern Aggression?”

“The Civil War.”

“Oh. Right.”

“He was a truly despicable character, despite the fact that he was one of my revered ancestors, rumored to have beaten the help and, of course, he was there during the Fort Pillow massacre. Anyway, I used to see him when I was a child. I’d be playing in my room and I’d feel a brush of cold air and all the hair would rise along my arms and I would know he was there. He didn’t scare me at first—children don’t question such things—but I could tell he wasn’t a pleasant thing, and after a while I didn’t want him around. Mother didn’t mind, of course; she said he was family and we mustn’t be ashamed of him, but we mustn’t talk of him in public either. No airing of the family linen and all that rot. As I got older I saw him less and less.