Charlotte’s Story (12 page)

Press nodded and excused himself. As he left the room, he ran a hand over Michael’s head, making him squawk with pleasure.

“Daddy!”

Press went through the kitchen door, which meant he was probably going to the mudroom for his boots and thus would presumably be walking in the orchards rather than on the lane. It felt strange not to care that he was upset with me. My head was too full of the screams of the bird, and the look of Press’s smile. I wasn’t sure what either meant. I felt confused and angry.

Five hours later, while the rest of the house was sleeping, I found myself still awake, unable to settle. Terrified that I would be awake until dawn—Bliss House, no matter how familiar it feels, is no place to wander or wonder in the loneliest part of the night—my resolve not to take the sleeping medication that Jack had prescribed gave out, and I put several drops in some water and drank it. Not long after, I fell into a dreamless, uninterrupted sleep.

After breakfast in my room, I started down the gallery to the nursery, stopping in front of Press’s door to listen. Nothing. Was he even inside? I put my hand on the doorknob, but then didn’t turn it.

In the nursery, I found Michael again sleeping later than usual. The shades were still drawn, and the weak daylight barely showed around their edges. Standing over my son’s crib, I let my hand hover a bare inch above his damp forehead, not touching so he wouldn’t wake. His mouth was open, and his breath made a little hum as he exhaled. I longed to trace the sweet curve of his tiny lips. Before Eva was gone, I had prayed that he would be kind and smart. But now I only prayed that he would live.

Eva’s trundle bed across the room was made up with its ruffle-edge coverlet and sham over its single pillow. On it, I could see the outlines of the rubber-faced Lassie dog my father had given her and Buttercup, one of her favorite dolls. The rest of her toys lived on shelves, safe from Michael’s curious, careless hands. She had let him play frequently with the Lassie, not minding that he would pull it to the floor, laughing, then drop onto it with a loud
oomph
, and laugh some more. There was no reason now not to let him play with everything. But it didn’t seem right. I felt protective of her things, as though they’d become mine. Or as though she might come back and want them.

Leaving Marlene in Olivia’s bedroom to sort through clothes, I went into the morning room and shut the door between us. Marlene had been solemn, but I could tell she was pleased when I’d told her she could take whatever clothes she wanted for herself before sending the rest into town for the thrift store. She and Olivia were about the same size, and as she held up one dress after another in front of the mirror, she looked like a different woman. I rarely saw her out of her shapeless, uniform-style dresses. But when I suggested that it would be fine with me if she wore other, more comfortable clothes—Olivia’s or her own—when we weren’t entertaining, she had looked offended.

“Is there something wrong with my dresses, Miss Charlotte?”

“Of course not. I just thought you might be—I don’t know, Marlene—bored.” Realizing I’d made some kind of mistake, I immediately tried to take it back and apologized. (Something Press would’ve frowned on, I knew.) “I’m sorry. I didn’t mean anything by it.”

“Mrs. Bliss never objected. Did Mr. Preston say something?” Frown lines creased her soft, pleasant brow.

I shook my head. “Please forget I said anything at all. It’s not really my business what you wear.” My departure from the room was probably quicker than was strictly decorous. I couldn’t help but be embarrassed. Along with everything else that had happened, it was going to be a long time before I got used to dealing with Marlene and Terrance by myself. But Terrance worried me more than Marlene. I was awkward with her, yes, but I found him puzzling. He had started taking his instructions, I assumed, from Press. Or perhaps he had been here so long that he didn’t need any instruction at all.

The morning room, on the west side of the house, was even less bright than my own bedroom this early in the day. As I opened the windows, I could see beyond the garden and into the changing trees whose colors moped against the pearly gray of the sky. By the end of the month, we would be able to see all the way out to the swimming pool that sat in a small clearing in the trees. It was a strange place for a swimming pool. Olivia hadn’t wanted it in view of the house and gardens, and I suspected it had something to do with her sense of personal modesty. The shade that covered it meant that the well water that filled it rarely got above the frigid temperature it had been when in the ground. In the fall, the pool filled with leaves that had to be dredged out by the part-time gardener. When my eyes lighted on Eva’s little playhouse on the path, I turned back to the room.

All around me, the children in the portraits stared or looked away, depending on where the portraits were hung. Why so many
children? Most of them girls. Yet Press, Olivia’s only child, had been a boy. I wondered if she had been disappointed to not have a girl instead. Had Eva filled that need for her? I certainly hadn’t been any kind of daughter to her.

There had been times when I’d wished for a closer relationship with her, but I was shy, and Olivia, while kind and generous, had been as emotionally distant with me as she was with Press. How strange it must have been for the two of them, living in Bliss House all those years together. If Press had been closer to her, I suspect I might have felt more encouraged. They were always polite but distant with each other, as though she were a fond aunt and he a dutiful nephew.

It made me happy that she had seemed to want to be closer to Eva. That past spring, she’d begun to let Eva occasionally come into the morning room when she was having her late-morning tea. I had looked across the hall one morning to see Eva tapping politely on the morning-room door, waiting until Olivia answered. Had Olivia shown her the toys in the closet? Eva had never said, but I knew that if I had been the inquisitive four-year-old my daughter was, I couldn’t have resisted asking what was behind the door. I’m certain she would’ve been frightened of the hideous taxidermy animals. I should have asked Press if he knew where they’d come from, but I never did.

With the windows open, the room quickly turned humid. October rain didn’t yet mean it was cold outside. Still, it was pleasant—particularly during that time of day, before the sun bled through the windows. I decided that if the room were ever to be mine, I would have to change it. The wallpaper and the paintings felt oppressive. Yet even though I felt watched, overwhelmed, I also felt a sense of belonging. All those years, I’d been an outsider in Olivia’s small world, and now it was my world. It felt right that Eva had spent time there too.

But what I’d come into the room for was not in the room itself, but in the closet.

I had opened the windows and looked outside. I had looked at the portraits. I had thought much about my daughter and the former owner of the room. Why was I hesitating? I knew the thing that waited for me in the closet was important. Olivia had meant for me to find it. I didn’t know what was under the drape, but when I’d touched it, a kind of current had run through my body. Yes, Olivia had meant for me to find it.

Despite the dustiness of the articles on the shelves, the fitted drape was pristine. I lifted it away, folded it, and carefully put it aside. A small brass plaque on the side of the antique projector I’d revealed read
PALMER’S MAGIC LANTERN.

Terrance removed a table lamp and a set of porcelain dogs from a small drop-leaf table that was against the wall, and set them on the desk.

“Mrs. Olivia Bliss liked to use the lantern in the evening sometimes. I’m sorry to say that we no longer have the screen, Miss Charlotte, but I can hang a sheet on the wall for you.”

“Where did the slides come from? There are so many.” I stood in the open doorway of the closet, looking at the boxes. Like the lantern itself, the individual boxes were heavy, but the boxes weren’t so heavy that I couldn’t carry them myself. I lifted one from the shelf.

“Family, I believe.” That was the only answer I got from him.

He moved the table into the middle of the room and took down the paintings from the facing wall. Despite his slenderness and age, he didn’t struggle at all with the projector in the way that I had. I could only lift it an inch from the floor. As he carried it to the table, I stayed near him, my arms held out in a pantomime of helpfulness. When it was settled, he breathed forcefully—it might have been a sigh. I wasn’t sure.

“Shall I put the sheet up for you tonight, Miss Charlotte?”

I glanced wistfully at the tall windows. It hadn’t gotten any grayer outside, but then it wasn’t turning sunny, either.

“I can put it up right away if you like. The curtains can be closed.”

While I usually tried not to be any more trouble than I needed to be, my desire to see the slides overrode any thoughts of Terrance’s inconvenience. He did, after all, work for me. I smiled.

“I’d like that, thank you. Will you show me how to use it?”

Chapter 11

Another World

Virginia history is in my blood. I didn’t have to read much about it in books, because much of my family, particularly my father’s sisters, talked about it as though it had happened in their lifetimes. Neighbors and acquaintances identified themselves by their links to the Revolutionary or the Civil War, and there were a few people still alive who had witnessed the latter. One of my very distant uncles had served under General Washington, and as Virginians my family’s loyalties were hardly split when it came to the Civil War—or The Recent Unpleasantness, as one of my aunts liked to call it. As a child, all my school holidays were spent tromping around battlefields with my father: New Market, Fredericksburg, Fort Sumter, Shiloh, Gettysburg, Malvern Hill.

But college showed me so much more. We took bus trips to Washington, D.C., and New York City. We prowled through museums and great houses. We stood quietly in artists’ studios, letting the smell of oil paint permeate our skin while we listened to
artists tell their stories as they worked. (Painters have a reputation as introverts, but the ones I met were full of information—gossip and history and opinions of the world that were remarkably observant. And they loved an audience.) Back at school, I reveled in my art and art history classes. Painting or drawing, and often sitting in the dark auditorium staring up at slides of the artwork that wasn’t readily available to us. Artwork from the Louvre and Florence and Amsterdam. Of course, many of the girls at school had traveled extensively and found the classes dull. But that was never true for me.

As I sat in Olivia’s morning room, the curtains drawn, a cooling pot of tea nearby, I tried to remember the way I’d felt at school: calm but ready for something new. I closed my eyes, resting in the quiet, listening to the electrical hum of the projector. Had my last days of calm really been before I’d married Press and come to this place? If anyone had asked me weeks or even a few years earlier, surely I would have said that I was happy. I loved my children. I loved Press. Didn’t I love him? Now I just felt like I didn’t know him. He had always given me everything I needed. If I had suspected him of being selfish, it wasn’t that he had kept things that were rightfully mine for himself. With me he was always generous—even if he wasn’t quite with others.