The Legacy of Eden (32 page)

“Who cares?”

She blinked.

“What?”

“Who cares? You think any of us would choose the farm over undoing…all of that? You think Mom or God even Dad, or Granddad—any of us would choose that?! You had no right, none, you had no right to choose for us.”

“Are you simple?” she sneered. “Do you know what I am talking about? He was trying to get your grandfather to sell it, to give it to some goddamn food manufacturer. Wooing him and Piper, who frankly I expected more from, with his tales of money. How the last farm they’d bought, which had been nearly five hundred acres less than ours, had sold for a million dollars. As if that was all that counted. As if that meant anything. We were more than just the success of the farm by then. We were a name, we were our land. We built this home from nothing. Nothing—” She gave a furious choking noise. Instinctively I reached for the water but my hand stopped before the jug. It didn’t matter; she didn’t stop speaking for long.

“But he didn’t know. Jude never did understand. He didn’t love it, he didn’t feel it. It was just a thing, a large toy to be played with and handed over at will. But your grandfather—God, I was so disappointed in him. But he would keep turning to the outside for influence instead of looking in. And I knew then, I knew that I had to teach him a lesson, one that would mean he would never look outside this home again. Home is all there is.”

I dropped my gaze to the floor. “This was Claudia’s home,” I half whispered.

“And it will be again,” she said, frowning. “Patience, Meredith.”

“Do you know what Mom would do if she knew this?”

“Are you deaf? She already knew. And she dealt with it as best she could. I don’t blame her.”

“I don’t know why I listen to you,” I said, my voice breaking.

“You listen because you’re interested, my girl,” she said, smiling, her hooded eyes blinking heavily. “And I talk so that someone will remember, after I cannot.”

Claudia was sent away by our mother less than a month after she accused Jude of trying to rape her that night by the barn. Our mother still had some relatives on our maternal grandmother’s side in Boston. She was to finish her senior years of high school there. It was explained to all of us as a fresh start for her, away from a place with too raw a memory. We did not question our mother’s decision. We were too afraid of the answer she might give. The night before she was due to leave, Ava and I hovered outside her bedroom after Mom had gone to sleep, gently scratching the door so she would know we were there and let us in. But even though we could see the shadow of her night-light underneath her door, it remained firmly closed.

The next morning our uncle drove her to the airport with Ava and I in the back of his truck. We had insisted on coming with her to say goodbye. Our mother did not try to stop us nor she did she accompany us. Instead, she handed Claudia her suitcase at the door.

“Phone me when you arrive,” she said. She did not embrace my sister, who stood there, rigid with hate, but she did not drop her gaze from hers, either. For a moment there was silence and then Claudia turned her back and left.

Ava and I were silent in the back of the truck on the way to the airport. Claudia sat staring straight ahead and no one tried to make conversation. When we arrived, Ethan stepped out of the truck and went to get her bags and suitcase. I put my hand on the door handle but Claudia stayed where she was. She dropped her head and for the first time in my life I thought I might see my eldest sister cry.

Ava, who was behind her, unbuckled her seat belt and stretched out a hand through the gap between Claudia’s seat and the car door to stroke her shoulder. Claudia let it stay there and I saw her shoulders tremble.

“Will you write?” I asked, my voice sounding small in the air.

Claudia hesitated and then shook herself. Ava removed her hand. Our uncle stayed outside, the bags piled up on the sidewalk, smoking a cigarette.

Claudia opened the car door. “I’d better go or I’ll miss my flight,” she said and shut the door firmly behind her. Ava and I remained in the truck. Even though we never said the words we knew that we would not see her much again. I had fought Claudia my whole life, but until that point I had no memory of a life without her. She had been there since the day I was born. That was all I knew. And so, I began to cry.

Jude, to my then incorrect and partial knowledge, never came back to Aurelia, and I never saw him again. He had been living in the main house, and we were half a mile down from it, so we never got to see the shouting match between him and my grandparents, or him packing his bags, or the kick of dust from his truck that shot both gravel and a curse into the face of the white home with its beautiful promises.

I wish I knew more about what really happened that winter between those three people, but I don’t. I may have gotten the bare facts from the bedside of my mentally deteriorating grandmother, but still the whole episode is shrouded in mystery, as if I am viewing it through a semitransparent sheath. I’ll never know the full extent of what that episode did to him, nor really what happened in those evenings between Claudia and Lavinia at the house after my father’s death, that would make my sister revere my grandmother to such a degree that she would throw away her mother and sisters at the asking.

After the incident with Claudia, my grandfather started to drink again, my uncle beat his wife and my mother locked the bedroom of my eldest sister and forbade us to ever go in there, while my cousin Cal Jr. progressed from haunting spirit to flesh and bone once again. And with a pace that, when I look back on it was almost frightening, this soon became normal.

In our house my eldest sister and I sorted through the possessions of our youth. We did not bother about the furniture. We were not sure if we could even take it, so instead we sorted through the boxes of photo albums, of trinkets and jewelry, china plates and dolls, tea sets and toys. Methodically we opened and went through each of our parents’ possessions in an unspoken rule of saving everything that recorded their lives before and after us.

I found the tea set they had bought from the honeymoon in Quebec. I held the cup to my lips, remembering all the times I had drunk air from its chipped blue rim.

Claudia’s quick hands went through and sorted each possession, her eyes weighing both their monetary value and their sentiment. She did most of the work, really. I sat there on my knees, picking at the objects she placed on the floorboards for bubble wrap.

We did not speak. We did not stare at photographs and reminisce; we did not remark on the mutual memories that taunted us as we smelled our blankets and ran our fingers with care over that which we had once handled with so little thought.

It was after seven in the evening before we unloaded the last box in Claudia’s car.

“There’s one more thing,” I said and ran back up the stairs into the house. I found the loose floorboard by the window and lifted it up. The letters were still there in a plastic bag. I picked them up and went down to Claudia. She raised her eyebrows when I stuffed them into her hand.

“What is this?” she said.

I held them out to her. “Open them.”

But she didn’t need to. Her face said it all when she turned them over and saw her writing and the postmark on the envelopes. And I dared not look at her face and she dared not look at mine, and suddenly it seemed to me that ours was not a home, it was a grave and we were the ghosts that haunted it because those before us at least had death and all its release, whereas we were still anchored down by memory.

No matter how white they look, scars are still marks as raw as they were when first made. And for the first time ever I knew that running away had been my only salvation, because to stay and confront what I knew…

She turned from me and looked at the skyline.

I did not touch her, but I did not leave.

And then eventually, she put a hand over her mouth and clambered heavily into the car. But I waited outside. I couldn’t go just yet. There was still one more thing I had to know.

So I turned to walk away and she did not look at me. I made my way down the dust path, winding my way through the once familiar places to the rose garden—the garden my grandmother had tended, had loved and nursed over as if it were one of her own children. It was the only thing she ever gave life to that was a success. To do it, I had to walk through the trellis walkway, which was half torn down and what was there was covered in brown and mottle. The garden was now a mass of weeds and overgrown grass. It would have made my grandmother reel to see it, but the wildness of it somehow was a comfort.

I kept my eyes ahead and when I passed the spot on which it happened, I could feel him walking with me, but this time I could not look at him. I would not. He could haunt me anywhere he liked, but not here.

And then I stopped.

I was at the clearing with the stone god fountain. Though marbled with white rust all over, it was still intact, but that was not what arrested me. I had known it in my heart before I came, but even to see it was somehow still so painful.

Where three graves should have been were thick brown disruptions of earth, left open—he hadn’t even bothered to have them covered again. He had ripped them out of the earth and scattered them, God knows where, my grandparents and Piper. I wondered then when this had happened. Maybe it had been just after my mother had died and my last sister had left or maybe it was some time later. I don’t know. And then I wondered if they had ever haunted him, the way he haunted me. If rousing their bodies out of the earth they had so loved hadn’t wreaked havoc upon him ever since. If they had not sat in his car with him the night he crashed it and died, bringing him with them to their place of unrest.

This used to be a gravesite, a place of everlasting respite. My great-grandparents’ plot was still there, as was my uncle’s, thankfully untouched. We had lowered my grandfather and my aunt in turn next to them and cried. When it came to the funeral of my grandmother I hadn’t returned home. She died a few weeks before my midterms during my first semester and I had taken the timing as the excuse I needed to stop my mother from trying to guilt me into coming back for her funeral. I did not know that by then she had already been diagnosed with stage-four breast cancer, nor that she had known about it for some time. She would be dead by the following summer.

The wind stirred the gravel from the earth there and a few crumbs fell into the open mouths of the three graves.

When I returned to the car, my door was still open and Claudia was still sitting there holding the letters. I climbed in beside her. We sat for a minute in silence. I wanted to tell her about the graves, but just as I opened my mouth to speak she cleared her throat and said, “I would have done anything for her.” The shock of her voice made me meet her eyes. She looked right into me and shrugged.

“She was the only one who ever knew me.”

I waited for her to go on, but she didn’t. Finally she turned on the lights and the engine, put the letters in their plastic wrapping to lie nestled in her lap and we drove away from the farm for the last time.

Chapter 14

THE WORLD TURNED and with each spin I grew older. I whispered my secrets to my last remaining sister and she fed her hopes back into me. We made a cat’s cradle of our confidences. In so many ways it felt like we were all we had. My mother was never the same after Claudia left—each birthday, each holiday, the difference in her became more compounded and more obvious. Her love was not unconditional and this devoured her. She was still our Mom, still loved us, but she realized she did not love us the way she thought, because she did not forgive my sister and my sister did not ask her to.

My uncle held a knife to his wife in front of his son in 1986—six months after Jude had gone—and Georgia-May packed her bags and left for her surviving family in Florida by the end of that week. My uncle did not seem to care and he was slowly but surely relieved of his duties on the farm. The only thing that saved him from utter ruin was the fact that he was Lavinia’s son. She shopped for him, cleaned his house, cooked for him, all under a mildly disguised veil of contempt. And when he was drunk and we stumbled across his path, he only spoke of Alison—not his wife and child, but a girl whom we had never met and he had not seen in twenty years. Ava called that love.

He probably died calling her name.

For the five years after his wife and son left, my uncle drank himself into a useless stupor day after day. He was a tragic joke to us, someone to avoid, someone to pity and worst of all he knew it but he had no wish to change this, he only wanted to be alone, to have some peace. And then on the 3rd of September 1991 he finally got his wish. His body was found by a dog walker in the woods midmorning. He was forty-four. His car had run through a road boundary not three miles from home and had driven off the side of the road, flipped over twice and was found upside down. He hadn’t been wearing a seat belt.

Georgia-May did not come for the funeral.

And my grandmother lost her last surviving child.

She would tell me that a week after the funeral, she rose very early one morning, so early the sky was a wash of pale pink and the air was muggy with impending heat. The ground stretched before her and every place that she could see that the light touched she knew was hers, was a Hathaway’s, and it gave her comfort, it gave her purpose. She placed a hand on her belly that had nurtured two lives within it and in one of her weaker moments she longed for the quiet confidence of that beginning. She had not cried at the death of her firstborn. No one had, now that she had come to think of it. And for the first time ever, she felt something that shook her, something she had not expected: a treacherous sense of regret.

And then she looked up as a wind roused the dust of the land into a dance at her feet and she remembered who she was.

For some that day the sun simply rose in the morning, but for Lavinia Hathaway it burst.

Claudia dropped me off outside Jane’s house. She helped me carry in some boxes, which we piled up in the living room with Jane’s permission. Jane did not ask her how things had been, and my sister and I remained silent, only speaking when necessary. And then finally there was nothing left for us to do and we stood up and dusted down our hands and realized the time for goodbye had come.

Jane made her excuses and left us.

“How long did you know?” Claudia asked finally.

“Since Grandma got sick.”

“Did you ever…” She cleared her throat but did not finish. I shifted from one foot to the other. And then she stopped and, looking me straight in the eye, she shrugged. Because what was there to say now that could possibly make any difference?

“Do you know what happens next? With the farm, I mean,” I asked her.

“I don’t care, Meredith,” she said and she shook her head at me. “This is a good thing. You may not realize it, or want to believe it, but it is. We only ever kept it by doing the worst things for it. And I’m tired—I’m so tired of being one of us. Of being the one to live and remember. No matter where we go or what we do, it’s always there and now finally, maybe with it going, we can forget. We can sleep through the night.”

She pulled her car keys out of her pocket and swung them onto the loop of her finger.

“Goodbye then,” she said.

“Yeah…” And I’m ashamed to say my voice broke and I looked down at the floor and saw the heels of her boots move away and, as I looked up willing something, anything, to come forward, the door closed and she was gone.

I stood there in the doorway, listening to the machinations of the car start up, and the roar, and then the dying breath of the engine as she drove away. And just like that, I was all that was left.

But still I was not alone.

So how did it come to this?

They all died, of course.

Death came to visit Aurelia in 1991 and his stay there was incredibly productive. He pitched up his scythe and put up his feet and settled into the white house for what would be an energetic sabbatical. The first person he took was my uncle and then two months after that he turned his gaze onto Piper. His gift to her was cancer, ovarian and rapid. By a twist of irony, the person who nursed her through her death was my grandmother. She gave to that woman who had been her lifelong adversary, every last piece of comfort and respite that she could; every waking hour was devoted to her care, until one night she sent for each of us to come into the room where Piper lay and say our goodbyes and the rattling sack of bones there breathed for the last time. My grandmother cried when Piper died, actually burst into tears when she placed a hand on her chest and a mirror under her mouth, and there was no shadow of air on the glass.

It was the strangest sight I had ever seen, watching Lavinia cry. Her body was wracked with sobs, her eyes bleary and red, her howls erupting with a force that even her wringing hands could not stifle. She did not cry when her sons died, she did not cry when her own husband would die, but for Piper, whom she had treated as an enemy for over forty-five years, she cried. I don’t know why. That was one of the few things she would never tell me.

So Piper went first, four months after Ethan’s death, the day before Valentine’s Day, and then in May of the following year, my grandfather died peacefully in his sleep of a stroke. He just did not wake. Even though the blood vessels in his brain had burst, causing a sharp slice of agonizing, white-lightning pain, it was a mere moment before whatever void there was opened up and swallowed his soul whole. He died next to my grandmother and she only realized what was wrong when she turned over in the morning and saw how peaceful he looked. She lay with him for half an hour before she told anyone. She called us all to the house and broke the news in the living room while the coroner came to take the body. I remember how they wheeled him past us in the black mortuary bag. Ava whimpered. Cal Jr. got up from where he sat beside her and shut the living room door.

It was warm the day we buried my grandfather. Uncomfortably, unseasonably warm so that my black dress stuck to my back with sweat. There was no breeze, just unremitting sunlight beating down on the assembled mourners as the same priest who had conducted Piper and Ethan’s funeral droned on above our heads. I sat between my mother and Ava, my eyes unable to tear themselves away from the lacquered oak coffin. He was in there. Open it up and you would see him, see the dark blue suit that he only ever wore on formal occasions because he hated wearing suits. He was always tugging at the shirt collars, stretching his neck, or slipping his finger into the knot of his tie. My grandmother had chosen it. She had pressed and ironed it herself before she dressed him.

Get up, I thought. Get up and take it off. Get into your pants or jeans. In this heat the earth will cook you.

When he was lowered into the ground, my family and I stood up and one after another threw a handful of earth down onto the coffin. As I did so I felt like my life seemed to be the thing that filled in the gap between funerals. How many times had I done this now? My grandmother scooped the dirt in her hand, releasing it in a slow pour; my mother threw hers with a gentle toss while Ava repeated her delicate gesture and then it was my cousin’s turn. Only the five of us now, when once…when once…

His actions were slow but controlled. He turned to the bowl of earth on the stand, he lifted a chunk of it into his palm, shaking his wrist to get the measure of it. Then he stood on the lip of the grave and, tightening his fist, crouched down and flung the earth onto the coffin so that it fell in a rain of dirt landing with a splatter onto the gold-embossed plaque.

The priest faltered in his speech but only for a moment, while his eyes found those of my grandmother’s and the hands holding his bible clasped the spine. None of us looked at each other. We stood back as the diggers gently covered my grandfather in the dust of Aurelia. Our faces were masks that betrayed nothing to the other mourners.

My grandfather’s will was read at the wake. We retired to his study after he was buried and it was there that we discovered Cal Jr. was to be the main beneficiary of Aurelia and all its assets, after the death of my grandmother. When we learned the news my grandmother smiled at him. He turned his head and looked out the window.

And then all that was left was Lavinia, but Death had a different plan in mind for her. She would die, but not quickly. Hers would be piece by piece, starting with her mind.

It started with a small thing. Her utter lack of emotion in the weeks after the death of her husband. She had lost her son, husband and sister in-law in the space of a year and a half and yet she was surprisingly cavalier. People attributed this to either coldness or stoicism, but this can-do attitude was less a conscious decision than an inability to do anything else.

And then gradually, so slowly it was almost a tease, she began to forget things. Small things: appointments she had made, that she had run out of a particular food or ingredient at home, names at the tip of her tongue but never quite able to spill over. She attributed it to getting old. She was old. And then she started to write things down whenever she could, but then she would forget where she had kept them, these bits of paper, so she kept a book. But she would forget at the end of phone calls or conversations what it was she needed to write down in the first place and she knew then that something had permanently unraveled within her like caught thread.

So she made an appointment and she saw a doctor and she came home and realized that her time had finally come. She had been diagnosed with a particularly aggressive strain of Alzheimer’s and she had a year before she would come undone. She tasted the bitterness of her impending death and the manner in which it would come and it was then and there as she sat in her living room and gazed at the polished crystal and woods that she made up her mind.

No, there was no violent death for my grandmother. She would not have feared it if there had been. Hers was more torturous: she would waltz with death through dementia, as her brain slowly degenerated, taking her body with it. She would lose her memory and then her language and her speech until she was a living shell with everything she was and everything she knew gone.

And this was what stayed with her for a whole year.

When the disease began to take hold of her, my mother, my sister and I began to take turns to nurse my grandmother. My cousin was too busy on the farm to be able to help and in any case Cal Jr. didn’t have it in him. We were all that remained then, and I remember how lonely that feeling was. From having a home with grandparents, cousins and aunts, we were reduced to just the five of us. Yet Aurelia remained unchanged. The farm was still as great and as prosperous as it had ever been; it had expanded while we, its inhabitants, had shrunk.

We moved into my grandparents’ house. I was seventeen and filling out college applications. Ava had already graduated high school and had enrolled at Duke University, but she had deferred for a year while I was still at home and our grandmother was sick. She hadn’t wanted to go at all by then. She had wanted to stay and train in the local community college as a midwife. She loved babies: with them she was utterly at home. The day we had to move into our grandmother’s house, I had come out of the shower and found her in her bedroom shaking. She was sitting in the middle holding her duvet up to her mouth. I sat with her and positioned my wet head next to hers and held her. We never said a word, we didn’t need to. Our mother had tried to tell us how temporary this was and how necessary, with Cal Jr. living up in the house all alone, unable to care for our grandmother, whose condition was worsening all the time.

“We’re still a family,” she’d said. “This is just what families do.”

We moved in on a Wednesday and Ava smiled when she crossed the threshold. No one would have known there was anything wrong. Funny, but now that I think about it, that moment up in her bedroom was the last act of kinship between us in our home. We would never return to it the way we had left.

Ava got a job in town at a diner to keep her occupied, because Mom insisted it wasn’t good for her to stay in the house all day. Cal Jr. had been furious. He had berated Mom for tarnishing our family name—making one of us work in a common diner as if we were desperate and needy. Mom hadn’t lifted her eyes from her plate when she’d told him that despite him being the head of the family’s finances, she was still head of her own household and he had no right or sway over what her daughters did. He hadn’t liked that one bit. In a way, though, he had been right to be concerned, because it was only then that I began to really understand the change in my family’s stature after Ava took that job. For the first time I began to read in other people’s faces not the awe and respect I had known, but now a trace of discomfort. When I would first go in to see Ava where she worked, I would notice the regulars and how awkward they were about giving her orders for food and how they wouldn’t meet her eye when she stretched over them to pour coffee or clear away plates. I would sit at the red-topped counter and I realized what was in their minds when she moved away. It was the same question I saw on the faces of my classmates and teachers every single day at school.
Are you okay? What’s happening up there?