Summer in the South (17 page)

“She said it was over a girl.”

“Is that what she said?” His gaze remained sober, reflective. After a minute he set his sandwich down, carefully wiping the tips of his fingers. “It was more complicated than that. I did something wrong, something disloyal. Something Will and Josephine are never going to forgive me for.” He seemed unwilling to say anything else. He leaned back in his seat, stretching one leg out beside her. “They’re not forgiving people, those Woodburns,” he added, and there was something soft but insistent in his voice.

All around them was the hum of conversation, the clatter of silverware.

“You’re a Woodburn,” she said.

“Not the right kind.”

She told him then everything she’d learned about the Black Woodburns, including the mystery of Charlie Woodburn’s death. While she talked he sat very still, listening.

When she’d finished, he raised his glass, drained it, then set it back down. “Why would you want to dredge all that up? It happened more than sixty years ago.”

She was surprised by his reaction. “Why
wouldn’t
you? Aren’t you related to Charlie in some way?”

He shook his head. “That’s what’s wrong with this place,” he said. “Everyone gets so caught up in living in the past, they don’t live in the present.”

“But you have to admit it’s an interesting story.”

“Maybe to a fiction writer.”

Outside the windows the river glistened like a sheet of glass. A boy and an old man stood at the edge of the water, aimlessly casting their lines.

“Fraser Barron told me there used to be a ghost in his house.”

He chuckled and shook his head. “Fraser Barron,” he said softly.

“Do you believe Woodburn Hall is haunted?”

He looked at her as if he thought she might be kidding, but when he saw that she wasn’t, he said honestly, “I wasn’t there enough to know. I spent some weekends with the aunts when I came home from boarding school. But usually I stayed with my mother. The girl Will dated in boarding school, though, had a different take on it.”

“Hadley?”

He looked at her curiously. “Yes, Hadley. She used to come and stay for weeks at the house visiting Will. She slept downstairs in that front bedroom and she used to say a dark man visited her in the night.”

Despite the heat, Ava felt a cold chill on the back of her neck. “What did you think of that?”

He stood abruptly and collected her empty plate, stacking it on top of his. His voice changed, becoming curt and businesslike.

“I always assumed it was Will,” he said, and turning, he went to take their plates to the counter.

A
fter that their conversation settled on less controversial matters. Jake told her about his days out in Santa Cruz and Ava told him about her time in Chicago. The restaurant gradually cleared around them but neither one made the first move to go.

Jake asked her what her novel was about and she told him, going into great detail about her plans for the book. She was honest with him, too, about the problems she was having getting started. When she was finished he said, “What do you like to read?”

She told him, running down the list of her favorite books, the ones she had displayed on her desk beside her rarely used computer, the classics she had read in childhood and college, as well as her current favorite contemporary artists: Alice Munro, Hilary Mantel, Doris Lessing, and Peter Carey.

“What novels do you have sitting beside your bed right now, waiting to be read?”

She told him. “The first is about an eighteenth-century Irish giant who’s paraded on the sideshow circuit in London during the Age of Reason.”

“And the second one?”

“It’s about a nineteenth-century Anglican priest transported to Australia for gambling who marries an heiress and on a wager builds and moves a glass church from Sydney to New South Wales.”

“You seem to enjoy reading historical novels.” He said this as if he was trying to make a point.

Later, they got around to talking about their childhoods (he had never known his father either, they had that in common), and after a slow beginning, Ava began to tell him about her vagabond childhood. She told him about her mother’s lie regarding her father’s death in the icy Detroit River, and she told him about the letter she’d received from the man purporting to be her father, and as she talked, she became more and more amazed, because she’d never told anyone before, and now here she was confessing it all to a total stranger.

“W
hy don’t you call him?” Jake said when she was finished. His hand lay on the table just inches from her own. She could feel a kind of heat emanating from him, a low vibration like pinpricks against her skin.

“Call whom?” she said vaguely.

“The man who sent you the letter.” Her expression made him smile. “Well, I can understand if you don’t want to call him, but at least write him. You have his address. Write him and ask him why he never, in twenty-eight years, sent you a birthday card or a Christmas card. It’s an honest question. You deserve an honest answer.”

W
hen they walked outside the parking lot was nearly empty.

He walked her to her car. “Do you like horses?” he said.

“I used to,” she said. “I read
Black Beauty
when I was eight. And I desperately wanted a pony when I was ten. But I’ve never really been around them.” She was rambling again. Now that they were outside in the bright sunlight, she felt a momentary awkwardness, a feeling of constraint.

“My mother raises miniature horses.”

“You mean those tiny ones the size of big dogs?”

“They’re as smart as dogs, too. They’re house-trained, and they sleep with her at night. When she takes them to the mall they wear little sneakers made especially for miniature horses.”

She smiled. “You’re kidding.”

“I’m dead serious.” He was quiet for a moment, staring off behind her at the distant river. “Would you like to go with me out to her place?”

She had a sudden vision of Will’s face, of Josephine’s cold gray eyes, if they should find out. “Oh, I don’t know,” she said.

“Not tomorrow. One day next week.”

Ava watched a flock of starlings careening above a chestnut tree. “I have a lot of work to do.”

“My mother knows all about Charlie Woodburn. You can pump her for information if you like.”

Looking up into his face, she had a feeling of falling, of the ground opening up beneath her feet.

“All right,” she said.

O
n the drive home, she thought about what Jake had said about her liking historical fiction, his inference that maybe this was something she should try writing. It was astounding to her now, thinking back on their conversation, how much personal information she had shared with him.

As a child, she had clipped photos from magazines and pasted them into little “books” she made out of construction paper, folded and stapled down the middle. She had written stories to go with the photos, filling the pages with her childish scrawl. She never showed the books to anyone, not even Clotilde, storing them in shoeboxes under her bed, and taking them out from time to time to “read.” It was one way she had found to fill her solitary childhood, but it was more than that; the act of creation gave substance and shape to her life. It made order out of the chaos. Sitting in school day after dreary day, she couldn’t wait to rush home to her little books, her little worlds.

Later, when she went to college and read Flannery O’Connor and Eudora Welty for the first time with understanding, she had become more concerned with technique, dissecting the author’s work to see how it had been formed, how the author had used theme, symbolism, meter, all the tools of the trade.

When she landed her first real job, she told herself it was just temporary. She’d do her real work in the evening, working on her novel, a sloppily sentimental historical romance. And she did, for a while, plodding through endless drafts trying to correct the choppy style, the unrealistic dialogue, the clichéd plotlines. But over time she grew bored with the story. Sitting down in the evenings became a kind of torture, a bleak realization of her talents laid out against the bright shimmering fabric of her dreams. Yet she couldn’t stop, she couldn’t give up so easily. To stop writing completely produced in her a bleak and relentless depression, so she stubbornly persisted, plodding through endless drafts and revisions, telling herself she was learning something each time. She was still working on this rambling seven-hundred-page novel when she met Jacob.

For a time her growing infatuation with him produced in her a kind of restless energy, and she went back to work on her novel with renewed vigor and resolve. But eventually she settled back into the writing doldrums. The drama of her life with Jacob seemed to overtake the drama of her novel, and she found it easier and easier to procrastinate, to spend long hours patching together their relationship rather than writing.

Yet she knew she was a good writer; her high school teachers and college professors had all told her so. Jake’s comment, so true in its implication, had shaken her. She knew he was right. She had to find a way to recapture the passion she had felt writing those first childhood stories.

She had to find something to write about that captivated her.

Our Town Is Rife with Suicides

A
fter Alice Barron’s barbecue, the mood in the Woodburn house shifted. The barbecue seemed to have cemented something. There was an air now of accord and delicate expectation, as if everyone was tiptoeing around on eggshells. Even Josephine seemed to warm to Ava.

Ava and Will spent their evenings now going around to parties: supper clubs, cocktail parties, graduation barbecues.

Woodburn was a town of social ritual. In addition to the daily afternoon gathering for Toddy Time in the big houses lining River Road, there were teas, barbecues, birthday clubs, church fund-raisers, supper clubs, and Bunco groups. Ava had lost track of the invitations she’d received. The women were all very friendly and sweet. Regardless of their educations, their lives seemed to revolve around children, husbands, houses, and social events. The women’s movement might never have happened here. In addition to enjoying the indulgences of their nineteen-sixties counterparts (cocktail parties, dinner groups, prescription drugs), these women also engaged in something called “me time,” which included spa days, shopping jaunts to Nashville, and tennis trips to the beach.

One husband told Ava, “In my next life I want to come back as a Woodburn housewife,” but he was smiling indulgently at his wife when he said it, and Ava could see that he felt a certain masculine pride in her for accepting this lifestyle, and in himself for being able to provide it.

It was, after all, a very pleasant, carefree existence, a life of safety and security.

Woodburn seemed to be seeping into her bones like the heat. Accustomed to the hectic pace of Chicago, Ava had, at first, found the slow-moving, slow-talking townspeople hard to take. But gradually, effortlessly, she was succumbing to the languid charm of the place. How lovely to rise when she felt like it, to spend the morning reading in the cool library or beneath a slowly moving ceiling fan on the verandah; how wonderful the traditions of afternoon nap and Toddy Time. The slow pace of the days suited her, Ava realized. Instead of cramming as much as you possibly could into a twenty-four-hour space, you built your day around one daily task; shopping, reading, working in the garden. One day followed another with a kind of slumberous certainty.

And yet there was a worrisome aspect to this lifestyle: the fact that it was so easy to forget work, to put it aside indefinitely in the pursuit of pleasure. There was a slightly addictive quality to the way Will and his friends lived, Ava realized in brief moments of clarity, a quality that might be detrimental to a writer.

“I thought we might have a party,” Will said one evening.

It was the day before Ava was supposed to see Jake Woodburn again, to go out to his mother’s house, and she was in a very good mood. She was sitting in the library playing Scrabble with Will, Josephine, and Fanny. Toddy Time was over, and Maitland was in the kitchen finishing up dinner.

“Oh, yes, a party!” Fanny said, clapping her hands.

“For the young people, not for us,” Josephine said. She smiled serenely at Will. “I think that’s a marvelous idea.”

“At Longford,” he said.

If he had heard about her lunch with Jake, he hadn’t mentioned it. Ava had meant to tell him, but as the days wore on and his mood continued to be cheerful and sociable, she hadn’t wanted to spoil it. Now, of course, she’d left it too long and there was no casual way to bring it up.

“What do you think?” he said, turning to Ava.

Ava was remembering what Jake had said about writing to the man who might be her father and demanding that he explain his absence in her life. She had been thinking of this, off and on, for days. Yes, of course, he was right; she was owed an explanation. If nothing else, she was owed that.

“Ava?” Will said loudly and she looked up to see everyone at the table staring at her.

“Are you feeling all right, my dear?” Josephine said, not unkindly. “You seem a little flushed.”

“I’m sorry,” she said. “Is it my turn?”

“Did you hear what I said about the party?” Will’s eyes fastened on Ava. His smile thinned.

“Yes. A party. That would be great.” She looked down at her tiles, moving them around. She had dreaded the visit, in the days following her lunch with Jake, feeling that she had allowed herself to be manipulated into agreeing to go. But as the day approached, she found herself anticipating tomorrow’s lunch. The chance to gather more information on Charlie Woodburn was irresistible. And she had never seen a miniature horse.

“Will you help me?”

She looked up again. “Help you?”

He gave her a cool, studied look. “With the invitations?” he said. “With the planning?”

She smiled faintly. “Of course,” she said.

He continued to stare at her.

“There’s a stationery shop on the square that does a nice job with printing. Use them,” Josephine said. “They have a woman who does calligraphy so you can give your list to her.”

Will was quiet now, staring down at his tiles.

“Printed invitations!” Ava said, trying to restore his good spirits. “I don’t think I’ve ever had a party where printed invitations were sent.”

“Oh, really?” Fanny said.

“That will change,” Josephine said quietly.

Ava thought,
What will change?
She wanted life to go on just as it was. She didn’t want to think about what was coming later.

T
he following morning was overcast, and Ava rose earlier than usual and showered and dressed before going in to breakfast. Fanny and Josephine had gone downtown to see their lawyer but Clara and Alice were sitting at the table in the breakfast room, lingering over their coffee.

“You look nice,” Alice said, surprised at seeing her dressed. “Where are you off to this morning?”

Ava poured herself a cup of coffee and sat down at the table. “I’ve got some errands to run,” she said.

“Better take an umbrella,” Clara said. “It’s going to rain.”

Ava stirred her coffee and stared serenely out the window at the ominous sky. She had made arrangements to meet Jake at the barbecue place and follow him out to his mother’s in her car. She had been adamant about driving herself, not knowing how the visit might go and not wanting to be dependent upon him for a ride back. Besides, she didn’t want anyone to see her riding in a car with Jake, at least not until she’d had a chance to tell Will about befriending him. She glanced at the clock, noting that she had almost an hour before she was to meet him.

“The other morning when we were talking you said something interesting,” Ava said, not looking directly at either woman. She had found that although Fanny, Josephine, and Will refused to talk about Charlie Woodburn, she could sometimes coax Clara and Alice to speak of him if the aunts weren’t present. That was how she had discovered that the bedroom she slept in, the very bed she slept in, had once been used by Charlie.

“You said Charlie slept in the front bedroom where I’m sleeping now, but Fanny slept upstairs. Was that common in those days?”

Alice coughed lightly, her eyes darting to Clara. “It wasn’t uncommon in those days for married people to have separate bedrooms,” she said.

“But surely it was uncommon for newlyweds?” Ava tried not to appear too curious, turning to observe a framed photograph hanging on the wall beside her shoulder. It was of a young Fanny and Maitland dressed in pith helmets and standing over a downed water buffalo. Fanny was very petite and pretty, wearing riding jodhpurs and staring at the camera with a look of brash audacity. Maitland was muscular and bronzed and looked a little like Charlton Heston in
The Ten Commandments.
There was a man in the foreground grinning widely, down on one knee beside the buffalo. He looked oddly familiar to Ava.

“He was a night owl,” Clara said, glancing at Alice, who snorted into her coffee cup. “Charlie could stay up all night but Fanny went to bed with the sun. At least she did in those days when she was expecting Sumner.”

“And Sumner was Charlie’s son,” Ava said smoothly, still examining the photo.

“Of course,” Alice said, as if any other suggestion was preposterous.

Ava nodded her head, wondering how to politely pose her next question. “And how long had Fanny and Charlie been married when she found herself pregnant with Sumner?”

“A little over a year,” Alice said quickly.

So it hadn’t been a shotgun wedding then. Fanny hadn’t been forced to marry Charlie because she was pregnant.

“He liked his cups,” Alice said.

“What?”

“Charlie. He was bad to drink,” Clara said.

“You mean he was an alcoholic?”

No one said anything. Behind them, the kitchen clock ticked steadily. Alice coughed again, delicately. “Josephine hated him with a passion,” she said. “She did everything she could to break up that marriage. He would bring low characters back to the house and sit up all hours of the night drinking and gambling. That’s why Fanny had her own room.”

Clara gave Alice a direct look. Ava could feel an undercurrent between the two women, some unspoken warning swirling through the room like smoke. She took the framed photograph off the wall and stared at it.

Despite Clara’s warning glance, Alice continued. “Maitland was brokenhearted when Fanny married that rascal. He’d loved Fanny all his life. When Mama asked Maitland why he didn’t marry someone else, he said, ‘Mama, some people are born to love only one person, and I have the fortunate distinction of being one of them.’ ”

“He was a patient man,” Clara agreed. “Waiting for her all those years.”

“She wouldn’t marry until Sumner was grown,” Alice said to Ava.

“But they traveled together?” Ava asked, tapping the photograph with her finger. “Even before they married?”

“Oh, yes. Everywhere. They were great travelers.”

Ava dipped her head and peered at the unknown man in the photograph. Why would Fanny and Maitland have traveled the world together and yet waited forty years to marry? She glanced again at the clock. It was when she looked back down at the photograph that it occurred to her who the man was.

“Oh, my God,” she said. “Is that Ernest Hemingway?”

He was waiting for her when she arrived at Battle Smoove Barbecue. The sky was a gunmetal gray but the rain had held off. She smiled and waved and he gave her that two-finger salute they all gave each other down here in greeting. He was driving the same old Ford pickup, and she followed him out of the empty parking lot and down a narrow, curving asphalt road.

His mother’s place was on the opposite side of town from Longford, and Ava began to relax, realizing she probably wouldn’t run into Will. They drove past several subdivisions filled with small modern-looking houses, surrounded by wide flat fields. A distant forest stood wreathed in fog, and farther on the mountain range rose above a bank of low-lying clouds like islands in a milky sea.

She wondered what his mother would be like. Sally was her name, he’d told her. She raised miniature horses and worked part-time at a local vet’s office. “A large, plainspoken woman,” Jake had warned her. “Don’t expect any of the old-money polish you find with the Woodburn sisters.”

The sun broke briefly between the clouds and Ava took it as a hopeful sign.

T
hey turned off the paved road finally and followed a sandy dirt trail between boxwood hedges. The hedges had been left to grow wild, and they were taller than the car and covered in trailing vines. Ava bounced along behind Jake as he pulled into a grassy clearing and parked beside a small log house shaded by two overhanging trees. Forest surrounded the house on three sides but to the back, Ava could see a vista of cleared rolling fields.

He climbed out of the truck carrying a large brown paper bag, waiting for her. She parked carefully in the gravel drive. The house was very small, with a steeply pitched roof. A stone walkway led from the drive up to the narrow front porch past a pair of geranium and ivy planters.

“What do you think?” he asked.

“It’s very quiet,” she said.

He walked ahead of her along the walkway. “She must be out in the barn,” he said. She followed him up the narrow steps into the house.

It was a true log cabin, one big room opened all the way to the roof rafters. A tiny galley kitchen ran along the back wall, next to a pair of French doors that opened onto a small deck overlooking the long sweeping fields in the back. A bedroom and bath were tucked into a small wing opening off the side of the house, and a ladder led up into a sleeping loft overlooking the great room, which was sparsely furnished with an L-shaped sofa, bookshelves, a round oak table, and various antiques. Several colorful rag rugs were scattered across the wide-planked pine floors.

“This is wonderful,” Ava said, looking around. All the windows were bare and looked out onto the forest or the wide sloping fields.

“Thanks. I built it.” He set the bag down on the counter and she realized he had brought lunch with him. “Will and I built it,” he corrected himself.

“You and Will?” she said.

He went to the cupboard and took down three glasses. “One summer when we were in college. Mama ordered the kit from one of those prefab cabin places and when the logs came, Will and I put it together. Just like you would a Lincoln Log set, only about a thousand times harder. It took us all summer, which doesn’t say much for our skill set, but we learned a lot doing it.”

“Where did your mom live before that? Did you grow up in town?”

“I grew up out here,” he said. “The land’s been in the family for about thirty years but we lived in a trailer before the house was built. I grew up in a trailer.” He looked at her when he said it, as if to give her time to understand the kind of childhood he’d had, the kind of people he came from. There was an element of polite restraint in his manner that had not been there the other day at lunch.

They walked outside, down a narrow path to the barn, which was little more than a two-stall lean-to. “Mama, we’re here,” he called out as they approached, and Sally Woodburn stepped out to greet them.

She was a big woman, not fat but solid, and she spoke in the nasal twang used by Darlene Haney, only her voice was deeper. Her hair was brown and cut short like Ava’s, and she wore jeans, a T-shirt, and a pair of muddy cowboy boots.