The Bride's House (16 page)

Once, she roused herself and said, “I love you.” She wasn’t sure who she was talking to.

“I know,” Charlie replied, as if he never doubted that she meant him.

Her hands slowly weakened in his, and she no longer grasped him. Then she took a deep breath and opened her eyes and said, “Take care of my baby.”

“
Our
baby,” Charlie said, and leaned over and kissed her. He sat quietly, his young wife’s hands in his, until Nealie’s spirit took leave of her.

PART II

Pearl

CHAPTER 7

W
HEN
P
EARL
D
UMAS WAS TEN
, a man she did not know called at her home. Her father took the stranger into the study and closed the doors, but the girl overheard the conversation. She didn’t understand it then. She never understood it, but she remembered it.

The man had come to the door in early summer, because the conversation was entwined in Pearl’s memory with the smell of lilacs, and lilacs bloomed in Georgetown at the end of June. Her father had planted the bushes the summer she was born, just after her mother died. That was the first year he’d lived in the Bride’s House, which was what people in Georgetown called the place, not the Dumas mansion but the Bride’s House. That summer morning when the man came, the long row of lilacs on the side of the house filled the rooms with fragrance.

The front door stood open, so the man knocked on the screen. “I’m looking for Mrs. Travers,” he said, when Pearl answered the door. He was handsome, trimmer than her father and about his age; his hair was streaked with a few threads of gray—silver, really—and he was well dressed. “I called at her little house on Rose Street where she used to take boarders, but a woman there directed me here.”

In fact, Lidie Travers had lived in the big white house on Taos Street since Pearl was born and had never again taken in boarders. Charlie had hired her as a housekeeper and nurse for the baby after Nealie died, and she had stayed on and now was as much a part of the household as Pearl and her father. Although she was charged with raising up the child, Mrs. Travers had not played the role of a mother. Instead, she was more of a confidante to the motherless girl.

Whenever Pearl wanted to know a thing about Nealie, she asked Mrs. Travers. Her father, Pearl knew, viewed the dead Nealie through a kind of veil, and his answers to Pearl’s questions painted Nealie as more saint than young woman. When the girl asked if Nealie could sew, for instance, Charlie replied that Nealie could have been a dressmaker to the Queen of England. Mrs. Travers, on the other hand, scoffed and said that Nealie liked to choose fabric well enough, and she had good intentions, but she was too impatient to sew a good seam and couldn’t have made a buttonhole if you’d given her a pouch of gold dust. “She helped me with a quilt once, and I had to unsew her portion,” Mrs. Travers confided to the girl.

Pearl knew a great deal about her mother, because Mrs. Travers insisted on telling her about Nealie. Such talk was unusual in that time, when many thought it was unseemly to mention the dead, that the girl would not miss her mother if the woman’s name were never spoken. But Mrs. Travers thought it best that Pearl know her mother as a flesh-and-blood person, not the ethereal presence that lived on in Charlie’s mind—
Saint
Nealie, as the housekeeper sometimes referred to her, although not in Charlie’s presence. The housekeeper ordered up an oil portrait of Nealie, made from a photograph, to hang in the parlor. A second photograph, framed in silver, had been propped on Pearl’s bedside table for as long as the girl could remember. Mrs. Travers chatted about Nealie as if she weren’t dead at all but only out on an errand, telling the girl about the green dress her mother had made when she first moved to Georgetown. “You could see it from here to town,” she said. And when Pearl teased for a kitten, Mrs. Travers explained that Nealie feared cats. “She said they’d get in your bed at night and suck the breath out of you. So your father does her honor by not bringing a kitten into the house.” Pearl was obedient and did not ask again, although she was not taken with superstition and thought her mother’s reasoning silly.

Her father insisted that the house be kept exactly as Nealie had left it, a kind of shrine to his dead wife, and the girl grew up knowing that everything around her had been selected by her mother, was a reminder of her mother. She formed her impression of Nealie through those things. Charlie had left Nealie’s clothes hanging in the closet, her hats in boxes on the shelves, her nightclothes and undergarments in the bedroom drawers, her brush and mirror, hatpins, hair receiver, perfume bottle, even her ribbons and gloves neatly arranged on the dresser.

Pearl would go into the bedroom when her father was out and run the brush through her hair, so like Nealie’s. She would stare at the clothes, feel the fabrics, the silks like tissue paper, the velvets warm in her hands. She never tried on the clothes. They were Nealie’s and precious, and her father would not have liked it.

More than the clothes, the house told her about Nealie. Her mother had loved bright colors, and she had taken delight in bric-a-brac, such as the china figurines that Pearl supposed resembled her mother. When she was anxious, Pearl would pick up Nealie’s marble eggs from the table, holding one in each hand, because they were cool and smooth, and soothed her. She liked to study the dead bird mounted under a glass dome, wonder where it had been shot, or maybe someone had strangled it. One glass eye was gone, making the bird appear to be blind in that eye, and feathers had come loose, but she knew that even if the bird molted until it was as bare as a plucked chicken, it would stay under that glass dome on the table.

Nealie had loved red, and the girl wondered about that. Even at a young age, Pearl was aware that red made a red-haired woman look like a wax doll. But maybe Nealie was different. Perhaps the red room had given her fire, something Pearl knew she lacked. Mrs. Travers told her how Nealie had taken pleasure in the kitchen with its icebox and hand pump. Why, she wouldn’t let anybody else step inside the room if she could help it, Mrs. Travers said. Even when she was far gone in pregnancy, Nealie refused to have hired help. Pearl knew that that was why she and Mrs. Travers did not have a hired girl to help them keep up the house now.

But it was the lilac hedge that brought Pearl closest to her mother, and that was odd, because Nealie had never smelled those lilacs. As a little girl, Pearl sat under the hedge with her dolls, named Nealie and Charlie, and played that both were alive, and that the three of them lived in the Bride’s House. Sometimes, she pretended the house was her own, that the combs and ribbons were hers, the elegant gowns, that she looked like the grown-up woman in the painting. As she lay in her bed at night smelling the lilacs, Pearl knew she lived in the most wonderful house in Georgetown, maybe the world.

They were comfortable there, the three of them, although Mrs. Travers said often enough, “You ought to marry again, Charlie. Pearl should have a real mother instead of a poor old housekeeper.” But Charlie always replied that there would never be another woman for him, that no woman was good enough to take Nealie’s place. After a time, Mrs. Travers gave it up, because it was clear that Charlie would never get out of heart with Nealie. Besides, it was obvious that the woman liked living in the Bride’s House and delighted in her position as the employee of a successful mining entrepreneur, and she must have known a new wife might insist the old woman go. If the truth be told, the girl, too, wondered if Charlie’s remarriage would spoil things, because she did not want anything to change. A new mother, she realized, would put away Nealie’s possessions, throw out the molting bird and the dried flowers that had turned paper thin and brittle. The memories of Nealie would fade. And if her father married, he might have other children, and the girl relished her place as an only child, her father’s favorite companion.

It was clear even to Pearl, who was not an especially perceptive child, that her father was inordinately fond of her. He hired a dressmaker once a year to make clothes for her, including a boy’s jumper and work shirts, because he often took her along when he made visits to the mines. He oversaw her education and considered sending her off to finishing school, but he could not bear to be parted from her. If the girl expressed a desire for a toy or a book, Charlie ordered it for her.

Spoon-fed though she was, Pearl was neither greedy nor spoiled, however, and she asked for little. The girl did not place a high value on possessions. She was content with the things her mother had left behind. She reserved her affection for her father and the housekeeper. Her devotion to her father was complete, and she suffered mightily when she offended him. Her greatest wish was to make her father proud of her, and her greatest happiness came when he compared her to Nealie, because Peal knew he grieved yet for her mother. It delighted the girl that she looked like Nealie. She did not know that in making herself agreeable—by being placid, it might be said—she lost that quality that made Nealie intriguing. Pearl overheard Mrs. Travers tell a friend once, “She’s good as can be, but she’s not a gaily girl like Nealie was.”

*   *   *

“Aunt Lidie’s not here just now,” the girl said as the stranger peered into the foyer, which was dark, and in the darkness, the girl was only a shape.

“Is this a boardinghouse?” he asked.

The girl laughed at such an assumption. “Just for Papa and me. Aunt Lidie takes care of us.”

“I was her boarder a long time ago,” the man said.

“So was Papa. He’s here. Do you want to see Papa?” The girl opened the screen door so that the light flooded in, and the man stared at her, startled.

“You,” he said.

“Yes?” Pearl answered, confused. She touched the cameo that had belonged to her mother. It was Pearl’s favorite piece of jewelry. She had replaced its ribbon three times, and fingered the piece so much that the gilt had worn off in places, revealing the pot metal beneath.

The man’s eyes widened when he saw the necklace. He stared at it a long time before returning his gaze to the girl’s face. “You’re Nealie’s daughter. You must be. I almost thought you were she.”

“Papa says I look like her, excepting I don’t have freckles. I’m glad for that,” Pearl said. Indeed, Pearl had Nealie’s angular face and peculiar red hair and pale blue eyes. She was tall, too, and had Nealie’s way of moving.

A strange look came across the man’s face when Pearl mentioned her father the second time, and he stood there, confused. “Your mother…” he faltered.

Just then, however, having heard Nealie’s name, Charlie stepped into the foyer from his study. When he saw who was standing at the door, he stopped, filling the small room with his bulk, and he leveled his gaze at the man. “What do you want?” Charlie asked. Still a big, shambling man, he was dressed in good leather boots and a fine brown suit and vest, a gold watch chain with a fob made from a gold nugget across his stomach. He had improved his appearance and manners since the days he’d been a boarder with Lidie Travers. But the boots were unpolished, the suit rumpled and ill-fitting, and for all his wealth and success, Charlie Dumas seemed more suited to the jumper and brogans of a miner than the smart clothes of a wealthy investor.

“I came to pay my respects to Mrs. Travers. I went to the old place, but they sent me here. I thought this had become a boardinghouse. I did not know you and Nealie lived here. Perhaps I shouldn’t have come—”

“She’s crossed over. Nealie’s dead,” Charlie interrupted. “Don’t you know that?”

“Dead?” The man put his hand on the door frame to steady himself. “How would I know?”

“Ten years ago. She died when the girl was born.”

Will Spaulding removed his hat and held it in front of him. “Is it so, then? I didn’t know.”

Pearl was touched by the gesture and the idea that the man had known her mother, and she said, “Aren’t you going to invite him in, Papa?”

Her father didn’t reply but stood aside, and Will came into the house and followed Charlie into his study. Then Charlie turned to his daughter and said, “My dear, this concerns business. You go play in your room.” He slid the pocket doors closed behind him.

Pearl stared at the walnut doors with their brass fittings before turning for the stairs. Then remembering she had been setting the table for supper when the man knocked at the door, she went into the dining room and finished putting out the flatware, the glasses, the cups and saucers, arranging them as she always did, the way her mother had. She thought to go outside and play then, but the sun was making such lovely bright slits through the shutters that she sat down at the table in her father’s chair and moved her arms back and forth under the stripes of sun and shadow. She was not a child given to secrecy or listening in on conversations that were not her business, but the men talked loudly, and she could not help but hear them, because her father had not closed the study doors to the parlor, which opened into the dining room. And so the girl overheard the conversation, which she did not understand.

“Tell me about her,” the man whose name had not been mentioned asked.

“You’ve no right to know.”

“I have every right.”

Charlie sighed. “No you don’t, but I’ll satisfy you. She died three days after Pearl was born.”