Burnt Mountain (6 page)

Crystal winced. Finch followed her gaze.

“Don’t worry about ol’ Buckhead. He didn’t die at Wentworth hands. My father couldn’t hit the side of a barn, so he bought
him in a gun place somewhere in Alabama. We never said it wasn’t his, of course.”

“I’ll remember,” Crystal said faintly, looking around. There were wreaths and garlands of fresh greenery all about, and urns
of holly bright with berries, and on the table behind the spavined couch stood a small fresh cedar tree trimmed in pinecones
and strings of cranberries and popcorn, with apples and oranges for color, and white lichens for snowflakes. There were no
lights, but on top rode a great, misshapen tin star, with shear marks still on some of its points.

“I made the whole thing, including the star, for the first time when I was about ten,” Finch said, grinning. “We always said
it was our Cove tree.”

Under the tree were piles of wrapped packages. A couple of large ones sat by the fireplace. On the coffee table, which looked
very much like a great barrel top, was a platter of cookies in the shapes of stars and bells and angels, all frosted with
glittering white icing.

“Corella again,” said Finch. “She always makes them, whether or not anybody wants them. Let’s take a look in the kitchen.”

The tiny, pine-paneled kitchen was darkened with the smoke of a hundred fires, and on one side many-paned glass
doors looked out into blackness. The other walls were hung with an astonishing array of pots, pans, knives, cleavers, spoons,
strainers, brushes, brooms, flypaper, and other things that Crystal could put no name to. A bulletin board held elderly messages,
stained recipes, yellowing photos of adults and children on the hills and by the lake, accompanied by numerous dogs of no
particular breeds. In all of them it was summer. In all of them everyone was laughing. Crystal wondered if she would ever
know who any of them were.

The pine counters were stacked with bowls and toasters and brown paper bags and foil-wrapped bundles. When Finch opened the
door of the chugging antique refrigerator she saw that it was overflowing with food: ham, roast beef, several pies, eggs,
milk, bacon, butter, casseroles of every description, many bottles of wine, and one of champagne, with a red ribbon around
it. A tag on the ribbon said:
TONIGHT!
On the middle shelf, alone, sat a small, beautiful wedding cake on a crystal plate, frosted and shining and embellished with
flowers and tiny Christmas candies. On its top were a miniature bride and groom of spun sugar. Around the cake, more vivid
holly rimmed the bowl. A note in Caroline Wentworth’s distinguished back-slant hand said: “You’ll have a much grander one
at your reception, but you must go to sleep on your wedding night with a slice of wedding cake under your pillow.” From the
oven came the smell of something rich and winey and buttery.

“Isn’t Ma something?” Finch said happily, and put his arms around Crystal and pulled her close to him. She put her arms around
his neck, tipped her face up to be kissed,
and then stopped. All of a sudden something—everything—the smells, the food, the leaping, lurching shadows, the utter blackness
and stillness outside… all congealed at the base of her throat and she retched.

“Oh, Finch, I’m going to be sick!” she wailed, pulling away. “Where—”

“Here,” he said swiftly, and jerked a door open. She stumbled into a small bathroom, with only a toilet and a washbasin in
it. She just had time to see that the room was papered with
New Yorker
covers, most of them yellowing, before she jerked up the toilet lid and began to vomit.

She vomited for a long time. It felt as if she would never stop, that there was nothing inside her that would not be heaved
from her stomach into this toilet on Burnt Mountain. But finally she did. She leaned weakly against the wall and finally gathered
the strength to look at herself in the speckled mirror. Then she began to cry.

Her beautiful coiled blond hair hung in her face in wet, lank strands. He face was swollen and blotched. As much of her chest
and shoulders as she could see was splotched with vomit, and the white pearled satin bodice had come unfastened and hung,
splattered and stained, off one shoulder. She closed her eyes again, and cried and cried.

Finch hammered at the door.

“Baby! Let me in! God, Crystal, you sound like you—”

“No! Don’t come in! Don’t you dare!”

“Then come out—”

“I am not ever coming out!” she wailed, and he wrenched the door open and stared at her.

“Oh, my God, darling, what’s the matter? Come here and let me see you!”

“No! I smell!”

He leaned her back against the wall and stared at her. Then murmuring and crooning, he held her close, rocking her as if she
were a child.

“Finch, you’ll get it all over you! Please just let me…”

He let her go and picked up fresh towels, wrung them out in hot water, and mopped her face and neck. With a damp washcloth
he cleaned her hair and hands. He turned her around, carefully unbuttoned the tiny round satin buttons of her bodice and caught
it when it fell to the floor, and put the whole satin bundle into the dirty-clothes hamper. Crystal stood, shivering and crying,
her hands over her eyes.

“Step out of your shoes,” he said, and she did, and then he unhooked the satin bra and slid the silk and lace panties down
her legs and off and tossed them after the dress into the hamper. With warm, wet towels he continued to clean her beautiful
naked body until it was polished, and had her wash her mouth out with a glass of icy springwater, and when she finally turned
to him, white and shaking and unable to speak, he reached into the closet and pulled out an enormous terry robe, its fluff
worn away but smelling of bleach and sweet soap, and wrapped her in it. And then he picked her up and carried her into the
living room and lay down with her on the sofa before the fire.

For a while he simply held her. Then when the shaking began to subside and she began to whisper horrified apologies, he pushed
himself up on one arm and looked down at her.

“Do you feel better?”

“Yes, but… I must look just so
terrible.
…”

“You are the most beautiful thing in the world to me,” he said, and kissed her face all over, and her neck.

“But I looked so pretty….”

“Well, you look just like you did, only you’re naked. Do you think you weren’t going to be naked on your wedding night?”

“Not like this! And you’ve still got all your wedding clothes on….”

He got up, stripped off the clothes and tossed them behind the sofa, and stood for a moment looking down at her in the fire-
and candlelight.

“One way’s as good as another,” he said.

She stared up at him, this tall, lean man who shone in the light like a young pagan god, who looked to her just as she had
imagined he would in the long nights in her bed in Lytton, when she could not sleep. Deep in her stomach, something old and
slow turned over, curled, stretched. It was warm, almost hot. She opened her arms to him and, without even knowing she did,
raised her hips on the prickly old sofa cushion, and moved them slowly.

“Yes, it is,” she whispered.

It was.

I gave my mother her honeymoon. I gave it to her, backward from the future, not long after my own. By that time so much had
been corrupted by her discontent, scalded by her bile, that it occurred to me, shamefully for the first time, that of
all of us, her pain must be the worst. She lived so long with it, could not, as others could, walk away from it.

“My God,” I said to the man who was my refuge, “she must be scarred on the inside from her brain to her stomach. Why didn’t
I know that about her? All this time and I didn’t even know….”

“I don’t imagine you were much in the way of being healed yourself until recently,” he said. “Couldn’t look till then. Now
that you can, do you think you might begin to see her a bit differently? I don’t think it would help her much, but it might
do you a mite of good.”

“I just honest to God don’t know. I don’t even know if I want to. It’s not like there’s ever going to be some great, tearstained
reconciliation scene. We can’t be anything else to each other than what we are. Can’t you see that?”

“Yep.” He breathed in a great, sweet-smelling lungful of smoke from the pipe he had recently affected and blew it back out,
watching it curl into the twilight dimness of our back porch. The pipe had annoyed me at first, but I didn’t think he liked
it very much himself; he seldom smoked it. There was no sense fussing about it.

“But,” he went on, in the thick, soft lilt that was like music to me still, “p’raps it would give you closure. Isn’t that
the word they’re usin’ now? ‘Closure’?”

“P’raps it would,” I said. And from then on, every so often, tentatively, as if I were afraid the memory might burn me, I
began to look back at my mother, metaphorically narrowing my eyes so that the naked sight of her would not sear my retinas.

Not long after that I lay in my bath and opened my mind to my mother. I stirred the popping bubbles in the eucalyptus bath
salts with my foot and consciously thought about her. I would, I thought, begin with her in a place I knew she was happy and
see where that woman led me.

“I’m starting with her honeymoon,” I told my husband when he ambled in and sat down on the edge of the tub, as he often did.
“Then, at least, I assume she was happy.”

“Sure of that, are you?” he said, popping bubbles with his long fingers.

“Well… why wouldn’t she be? She’d just had that humongous wedding and she was alone with him for the first time, up in that
mountain cabin….”

“You must remember as vividly as I do how she talked about her honeymoon,” my husband said, grinning as the last mass of bubbles
disappeared.

I looked at him.

“You know, ‘That dinky little cabin up there on that god-awful bare mountain, and cold as hell, and I threw up all over my
wedding dress and it never came clean and I wanted Lily to wear it, and then it iced and we couldn’t get out for days, and
I read old Mary Roberts Rinehart novels till I thought I’d scream, and of course with nothing else to do we got Lily, I bet
by the second night….’ ”

“She was just talking… you know how she does, when she tells a story about herself or Dad….”

He continued to look at me, a deep blue-eyed stare.

No. My mother had not had a happy honeymoon. So I lay back in my vanishing bubbles and gave her one.

* * *

It did continue to ice and snow lightly on Burnt Mountain. In the dark early mornings, before the gray winter light came creeping
into the bedroom, they could see the dancing stipple of snow light on the old ceiling and hear it ticking softly against the
old glass panes and they would turn in to each other under the deep-piled quilts and the old goose-feather mattress would
take them deep and they would make love again, sleepily, deeply, their skin hot against each other’s. And they would cry out
in joy and contentment, and go back to sleep, and when they awoke again, it was mid-morning and they would race, yelping,
into the icy little bathroom and pull on soft sweats and socks and sweaters, and build up the living room fire that never
really went out, and put on coffee to perk and then they would lie, intertwined, on the old couch under the thick old Chief
Joseph blanket that belonged to it, and look up through the skylight at the opaque sky and watch the snow fall. Softly. Softly.

And my mother was happy. She had not really expected to be. Oh, she knew that her feelings for Finch Wentworth were strong
and that she loved to look at him, and feel the hard pressure of his arms around her, but she had thought that their first
coupling would be in a different bed, a sweet-smelling one with satin coverlets, perhaps at the Cloister at Sea Island, where
so many young Atlantans honeymooned, perhaps even in the big tower room on Habersham Road that she had decided long ago would
one day be their bedroom. Perhaps even there.

She had not expected Burnt Mountain, and she had not
expected that the long body next to and around and inside her could give her so much abiding sensation and ecstasy. She had
not expected to willingly, even eagerly, spend so much time in bed and on sofas and even kitchen tables with him. It was the
first great gift of her marriage, his to her. Those first few landlocked days she was steeped in him, tasted of him, swollen
with him, aching for him. She, who had hoped to get the matter of where they would live, among other things, settled while
they were on the mountain, thought of nothing but the next time he would take her into bed.

Days passed thus.

On the morning of New Year’s Eve she woke up and looked over at him in bed. Before he could reach for her, she said, “Darling,
I want to go home. I want to spend New Year’s Eve at home. We always have scalloped oysters and eggnog and set off fireworks
on New Year’s Eve. I want to spend this first one with people and things I always have. Can we go home?”

He looked at her for a long while, smiling slightly, and then got out of bed, naked and shivering, and scrooched into his
sweats and socks, and said, “I think so. Let me see.”

She heard him on the telephone in the next room but could not hear what he was saying. When he came back into the bedroom
he was grinning widely.

“Yeah, we can go home. In fact, it’s a good time for it. Hop up and get dressed and let’s get the car loaded. It’s snowing
in Atlanta, so we’ll have to take it slow down the mountain. Should be a pretty drive.”

“How do you know it’s snowing?”

“I talked to them at school, to tell them to get the apartment ready early. It’ll all be done when we get there.”

He had decided that for the first few days they would stay in the apartment at Hamilton Academy that was set aside for the
headmaster.

“It’s not big, but it’s big enough for the two of us, and it’s perfectly comfortable when all the furniture’s in place. I
was having it redone while I was at your folks’ house, and they tell me they can move the furniture in today and even stock
the kitchen. We can go right there, and then on to your folks’, if you want to.”