Summer in the South (5 page)

He stopped in the doorway, his hand on the jamb. “And don’t worry about the aunts. They know you’re here to write and they’ll leave you alone. No one will bother you.”

D
espite her intention to explore the house, Ava was tired, and after Will left she went into the bathroom at the end of the hall to get ready for bed. Coming out into the darkened hallway, she stood for a moment listening to the gentle sighs and creaks of the old house settling around her. The front porch lights were on, falling through the fanlight and dimly illuminating the front half of the hall. The back half was cloaked in shadow. Above her she could hear the distant thuds of Maitland and Fanny and Josephine readying themselves for bed.

She went into her brightly lit bedroom, wandering around and peering at the treasures she found there, snuffboxes and ceramic thimbles and oil paintings of ancient hunting scenes: dogs with brightly feathered birds in their mouths, and men on horseback in pursuit of some hapless fox.

She stopped at the mantel, looking around her.

The room reflected pleasure and comfort and social prominence. It reeked of old money.

“I wish you could see me now,” she said aloud to Clotilde.

Not that Clotilde would have been impressed, of course. Clotilde was never impressed by material possessions. “They’re just things, Ava,” she always said when Ava exclaimed over some rich classmate’s house. “They don’t matter in the end.”

And yet some things had mattered. Clothes, for instance. No matter how broke they were, Clotilde always saw to it that they were well dressed. She disdained bargain department stores in favor of Junior League thrift shops, where they could pick up last year’s good-quality clothes, some barely worn, for a fraction of what they cost new. Anyone looking at them would never have guessed how they lived.

It was the heavy material trappings that Clotilde had cared nothing for: a house, furniture of their own, a car with less than 200,000 miles. She had died with a closet full of beautiful clothes and less than two hundred dollars in the bank. She had left behind a rusty Subaru, a stack of unpaid bills, and a shoebox filled with relics.

She had died alone.

Ava felt a sharp cramp in her stomach. She stretched her hands out on either side of the vase, grasping the mantel and looking down at her feet, waiting for the spasm of pity and remorse to pass.

S
he dreamed that night that she was skating on a frozen lake. The air was cold and prickly against her face, and she was flying over the ice like a bird, hurrying away from some danger she couldn’t see but could only vaguely sense. Behind her the ice was cracking, shifting, and she knew that whatever was chasing her was near. She could feel it breathing on her neck. Startled, she pressed on, but she found now that her legs felt heavy and her feet felt as if they were being slowly encased in ice. She struggled with the rising chill that seemed to be overtaking her, and as she did, she looked down in horror at her feet.

There beneath the rippled surface of the ice, a face stared back at her.

S
he awoke with a start. Moonlight flooded the room, falling between the slats of the shuttered windows. In the distance, a train rumbled mournfully. The horror of the dream gradually faded, and she turned her head repeatedly, assuring herself that it was just a dream and nothing more. Only a dream.

She turned her head and studied the massive mahogany furniture of the room. “Made by the people on Longford,” Josephine had told her. Not
slaves
, but
people.
The word
people
down here carried some kind of tribal significance. What was it they had asked her? “Where do your people come from?” As if Ava, who barely knew her own mother, who knew nothing of her father, should be able to explain the whereabouts of her ancestors. Southerners, who had stayed in the same small town for generations, seemed to take it for granted that the experiences of the rest of the country would mirror those of their own narrow world. No, not Southerners. She knew too few of them to be able to make such sweeping generalizations. Woodburns.
Landed gentry.
She had read about them in English novels but had never, until this evening, understood exactly what the term, with all its historical and socioeconomic connotations, meant. The Woodburns were like something from a Jane Austen novel.

No, not Austen
, she thought, remembering the face under the ice.

One of the Brontë sisters, more likely.

W
hen she awoke again it was nearly nine o’clock. Sunlight flooded the room, falling between the window slats and making geometric patterns on the dark floor. There was a scent of coffee and frying bacon in the air, and Ava could hear movement deep within the house, the clinking of china and silverware.

Coming out of her room, she stood for a moment in the sunny hallway, listening to the muffled sounds of the house. The lingering sense of melancholy she had felt yesterday seemed to have dissipated in the bright sunlight. The house seemed even more splendid than it had last night. Will had given her a tour, and she had passed in openmouthed amazement from room to room, but seen now in the brilliance of a summer morning, the shutters open, light flooding the large rooms and pooling against the darkly polished floors, Ava was amazed anew at the stunning elegance of the old house.

The ceilings on the first floor were twelve feet high and trimmed with ornate plasterwork. At one end of the wide central hallway, near the front door, a graceful staircase rose to the second floor. The rooms opening off the central hallway were expansive and filled with antique furniture, most of it in the Empire style. Oil portraits of dead ancestors hung on the walls. All the interior doors were massive, eight feet tall and nearly four feet wide. (“Wide enough so ladies in their hoop skirts could pass through,” Josephine had told Ava.) They were solid mahogany and, like the furniture, had been made at Longford. Oriental carpets covered the dark heart pine floors. A massive French gilt mirror graced one of the walls of the hallway, a place where the women of the house used to stand to check their wide skirts before venturing out. “If only that mirror could talk,” Fanny had said gaily to Ava, “what stories it could tell!”

She walked slowly through the dining room beneath the watchful eyes of Randal and Delphine, stopping to look at the many objects of interest. Along one wall, built-in glass-fronted cabinets housed an extensive collection of sterling silver. Several smaller sideboards held silver tea trays, jam pots, and ornate obsolete utensils. She stopped and peered at a gilt-framed letter hanging on a wall between two long windows. The script was barely legible but the signature was vaguely familiar.

As if sensing her presence, Will came through the butler’s pantry, whistling cheerfully. “Good morning,” he said.

“Morning.” She turned her attention back to the letter, tapping the glass with one finger. “Thomas Jefferson,” she said. “I recognized the signature. This is a very good replica.”

He smiled faintly, an apologetic yet vaguely defiant smile. “That’s no replica,” he said. “He and my great-grandfather Randal were friends.”

She stared in amazement, then turned and followed him through the butler’s pantry into the sunny kitchen.

Josephine was standing at the sink, an apron tied around her narrow waist. “There you are,” she said, as if she had been waiting for Ava. She was wearing a pair of yellow rubber gloves. “Are you hungry?”

“Yes,” Ava said, surprised. “I am.” She never ate breakfast in Chicago—she usually wasn’t hungry until lunch—but the delicious smells had awakened in her a ravenous appetite.

“There’s a plate for you on the stove. And coffee in the percolator.” Josephine nodded at the gleaming pot on the counter, glancing at Ava’s bare feet.

“Good morning!” Fanny called brightly. She, Clara, and Alice were sitting in the small sunny breakfast room off the kitchen. A large tabby cat slept on Fanny’s lap. Ava poured herself a cup of coffee and, collecting her plate, went to join them.

Will pulled out a chair for her and then sat down beside her. He seemed shy around her this morning. Attentive but unsure of himself. She was awkward, too, looking at the long-limbed man beside her and trying to remember the boy she’d known in college. She remembered the brotherly kiss he had given her and the jaunty way he had said goodnight.

“We’re being lazy,” Fanny said, stroking the cat, but Ava noted that they were all dressed except for her. Fanny wore a blue dress and Clara wore a pair of jeans and a red sweater. Ava was still in flannel shorts and a faded T-shirt, her usual sleeping attire.

“Sorry,” Ava said, running her fingers through her hair and glancing around the table. “I’m not really a morning person.”

“You’re on vacation,” Will said. “You’re entitled to sleep in if you want to.”

They had set a place for her, although it was clear that everyone else had finished breakfast some time ago. The table was cleared except for their coffee mugs and a pair of silver jam pots that Alice placed in front of Ava with a faint smile. Alice wore a coral-colored tennis warm-up with a flower-shaped diamond brooch on one lapel. Her dark blonde hair was cut close around her narrow face.

“As long as I don’t make it a habit,” Ava said. She had planned on rising early and finishing the outline for her new novel, a coming-of-age story about a girl and her mother traveling around the Midwest, before heading out to Longford with Will.

“It’s going to be a scorcher,” Fanny said, staring out the window. “Why, I can’t remember a time when it’s been this hot in May unless it was that summer all those years ago when the strange insects dropped out of the trees and the river was swollen with the rains. You remember, Sister. The summer of—” She stopped, a curious expression on her face.

“Yes,” Josephine said quickly. “I remember.”

“We thought we might take a drive,” Will said to the table at large. “Out to Longford.”

“Such a pretty day for a drive,” Fanny said. Alice and Clara looked at Fanny and she blushed suddenly, a deep crimson color.

Josephine stood in the doorway, wiping her hands on her apron. “Try the blackberry jam,” she said to Ava. “It’s made locally.”

Ava ate while the other four women talked quietly about an upcoming barbecue. Will stared out the large windows, his hand curled casually around an empty coffee cup. He had told her last night that he was renovating Longford, trying to update the house while remaining true to the architectural period. Upon being further pressed as to what he did for a living (she gathered from his demeanor that this wasn’t something she should have asked), he admitted that he flipped the occasional house and had been involved for some time in a local company that manufactured parachutes. He had sold that business, he told her, when he began the renovations on Longford. The reality, of course, was that he didn’t have to do anything and they both knew it.

“It won’t take me long to get ready,” Ava said to him, spreading her toast with blackberry jam.

“I’m in no hurry.” He gave her a brief smile and then glanced up at Josephine, who remained standing in the doorway. “Aunt Jo, do you think those blueprints might be up in the attic?”

“The plans for Longford? Possibly. I know there was a set that was given with the family papers to Vanderbilt. But there are still several old trunks and boxes I haven’t had time to go through.”

He rose, touching Ava lightly on the shoulder. “I’ll be back,” he said. He walked through the butler’s pantry into the dining room and a moment later they could hear his footsteps on the stairs.

“The attic?” Ava said, looking around with interest. Outside the breakfast room window, a profusion of hydrangea blooms pressed against the glass panes.

“Don’t go up there,” Fanny said, shuddering so that the cat opened its eyes and regarded Ava lazily. “It’s a morbid place.”

“One of our ancestors was a doctor,” Josephine said before Fanny could say anything else. “You can still see the outline of the staircase that once stood at the rear of the house. He used to occasionally see patients up there.”

“He was an anatomist,” Alice said. “A vivisectionist.”

“He was a man of science,” Josephine said. “Of natural curiosity. And in those days anatomy was a relatively new field of study. An unpleasant thing to be talking about at any time but especially over the breakfast table.” She glanced severely at Alice and Fanny as if to put an end to the discussion.

“I can’t imagine why he was allowed to perform his grisly experiments in the house,” Clara said, ignoring her. “That’s the part I’ve never understood, why Randal and Delphine would have allowed that.”

“Experiments?” Ava said.

“Dissections.” Fanny shivered again and the cat arched his back and yawned.

“It was illegal in those days,” Alice said. “Dissection. He had to pay grave robbers to bring him bodies in the middle of the night.”

“Resurrection men,” Clara said.

“Oh, for goodness’ sake!” Josephine said, one of the veins in her temple showing blue against her pale skin.

“He was one of Randal and Delphine’s two sons who survived,” Fanny explained blithely to Ava. “Great-Uncle Jerome. Out of sixteen children, they only had four who lived to adulthood. Great-Uncle Jerome, Grandfather Isaac, Great-Aunt Louisa, and Great-Aunt Sophia.”

“That’s terrible,” Ava said.

“Not so uncommon in those days,” Alice said.

“I was terrified of the attic,” Fanny said, stroking the cat and staring pensively through the window. “Papa used to keep it locked. We weren’t allowed to play up there. It was above the nursery where Josephine and Celia and I used to sleep as girls, and at night I could hear things moving around up there.”

“Oh, Fanny!” Josephine said, glancing sharply at her. “You were always so fanciful as a girl.”

Fanny tilted her head with a mildly surprised expression. “Was I?” she said.

Ava chewed her toast, aware suddenly of an undercurrent of tension in the room. She thought of the nightmare that had awakened her in the middle of the night, but like all nightmares it had already begun to fade, and she could remember only snatches of it now, a fleeting impression of fear and speed and glittering water.