Cruel as the Grave (6 page)

Helena engulfed Maggie in a sudden, fierce hug which left the younger woman breathless. “You’re just what we all need!” Helena declared when she had stepped back. “I haven’t felt so good in years.”

Maggie had to smile at her enthusiasm. Now, thanks to Helena and her memories of her grandmother, she felt she really had come home, despite her father’s great reluctance to bring her here.

Helena said, “I’m sure you’re ready now, my dear, for a little time to yourself to try to absorb everything.” She gave Maggie another hug. “I’ll see you later.”

The door closed behind her, and the silence in her wake was almost deafening. Everything about Helena was so vital that the moment she left the room even the sunlight seemed to dim a little. Maggie smiled as she remembered her father’s nickname for his favorite aunt. “Hurricane Helena” suited her very well.

Maggie decided that freshening up a bit wouldn’t hurt, so she went into the bathroom. The opulence of it seemed almost indecent to Maggie, accustomed to the functional style of her own bathroom in Houston. The combination of marble and gold looked terribly expensive. She could probably live comfortably for a year in Europe on what it had cost to fit out this bathroom.

She peeped hesitantly into a walk-in closet. Her clothes looked like orphans in one corner. The closet was bare except for her own things. Her grandmother’s clothes, if they had been kept at all, were not here, although the closet had enough space to house the wardrobes of several women, or so it seemed to Maggie.

She bathed her face in cool water and patted it dry with a thick, golden towel. Since someone had already thoughtfully laid out her toilet articles for her, she picked up her brush and tried to convince her hair to be a little less unruly.

Feeling somewhat calmer, she was still frustrated by not knowing the answers to several important questions. Her grandfather’s revelation about the timing of her grandmother’s death had stunned her. The last time her father had been in this house, his mother had died. Was she supposed to think that her father had played some role in his mother’s death?

She shrugged that off as nonsense as she walked back into the bedroom. Surely she was letting the unpleasant undercurrents among the family members get to her. Lavinia was enough to rattle anyone, she thought sourly.

As she was sitting down on the bed, a knock sounded at her door. “Come in,” she called out.

The door opened slowly in response, and her father stood framed in the opening. Tentatively he advanced into the room, shutting the door behind him. Gerard’s eyes focused immediately upon the portrait of his mother, while Maggie watched for his reaction.

The silence lengthened as he stared at the portrait. The obvious tension in his body, betrayed by the set of his shoulders, gradually drained away. After several minutes he turned to face his daughter, who was not surprised to see tears glistening in his eyes.

Gerard walked over to the bookshelves. His right hand reached out to caress the spines of several books. “Even your taste in literature you inherited from her,” he remarked, his voice devoid of emotion.

Maggie kept her voice low. “It seems so.”

He came to sit beside her on the bed. “She would have been very proud of you. Even though she never went to college, she was the best-read person I’ve ever known. These books here”—he waved his hand at the nearby shelves— “were her favorites, but she read all the classics, not once but several times.” He shook his head admiringly. “I don’t quite know how she did it, because there were so many demands on her time, but she always managed to read at least a couple of hours a day. Even my father,” he laughed, “knew better than to interfere when she settled down with a book.”

This sharing of memories by her father was what Maggie had wanted. The fact that it should have taken place years before was ignored at the moment. She sensed that her father was finally ready to talk about his past, and she was too curious about what he would tell her to criticize the timing.

She did venture a comment. “I gather you had a good talk with your father.”

Gerard smiled tiredly. “Yes. We talked about a lot of things—things we should have discussed years ago, of course, but we were both too stubborn to make the first move.”

“Until Helena made it for you,” Maggie said neutrally.

“More or less,” he replied. “Father prompted Helena to do it. I suppose he thought I would ignore a direct appeal.”

“Would you have?”

He frowned. “I don’t know. He’s always set my back up, ever since I was an adolescent.” Gerard laughed suddenly. “He probably still has a hard time seeing me as anything but that gawky teenager who defied him at every turn.”

Maggie amused herself for a moment, imaging her father as a rebellious teenager. She grinned.

“Anyway,” he said shrugging, “we finally cleared the air.”

“If you don’t mind my asking”—she couldn’t quite keep a note of irony from her voice—“why were you estranged in the first place?”

“It was partly over my choice of careers,” Gerard answered, then hesitated a moment. Taking a deep breath, he plunged ahead. “But the main reason was that I was responsible for my mother’s death.”

Chapter Four

Stunned by her father’s announcement, Maggie felt the silence in the room smothering her. She drew a ragged breath as she stared incredulously at Gerard, struggling with the implications of what he had said. Then her mind cleared, and she seized upon one word. “You said ‘responsible.’ What do you mean?”

Abruptly Gerard got up from the bed and walked to the French windows, standing with his back to her. “As far back as I can remember, my father and I never agreed on anything. There was always antagonism between us. I don’t know why it should have been that way, except our personalities are so fundamentally different.” He took a long breath. “My father has always been aggressive, going for what he wanted, no matter what obstacles stood in his way.” He turned back to Maggie and gestured with his hands. “That’s how he amassed the wealth to build a house like this. He built up a network of influence, took on high-profile cases with big payoffs, you name it. And he made a fortune.”

“So the family wasn’t wealthy to begin with?” Maggie asked. She was desperately curious to get her father to the point on his responsibility for his mother’s death, but she could see that, for now, he needed to tell the story his way.

Gerard laughed, a little bitterly. “No, the McLendons were just ordinary, middle-class stock until my father came along. He seemed to have the Midas touch when it came to anything to do with money. It was Mother’s family, the Culpepers, who had the breeding. They were once immensely wealthy, before the Civil War, but time and change eroded all that. Father rescued Mother and her family from ‘genteel poverty’ when he married her.” He snorted in derision. “My grandparents could hardly stand to look at my father, but they were sure enough glad to get their hands on some of his money!”

Maggie smiled, briefly, at her father’s defensive tone. He might argue with his father, but he wouldn’t let others denigrate him needlessly.

Gerard turned back to look out the window. “Father ended up supporting pretty much the whole damn family! Retty married a man who went through money like it was water. Helena has never made much of an effort to try to support herself. Harold did, but apparently he lost all his savings a couple of years ago in some kind of financial disaster, and he’s had to come crawling back home, begging.” He snorted in derision again. “Lavinia, of course, has been a parasite all along.”

He turned back to Maggie, his eyes blazing. “Can you see now why I was so determined to get away from him? I wanted to make my own way, call the shots for myself.”

“And you did,” she said quietly. “You’ve made a very good life for yourself, and I’ve never wanted for anything.” She grinned. “Except for that pony I wanted when I was ten. And the Jaguar when I was sixteen.”

Her father laughed, some of the strain leaving his face.

Maggie patted the bed, and Gerard came to sit beside her. “What happened when you left home?” she asked.

He shrugged. “All through graduate school, I never heard from my father, but Mother, Helena, and Harold wrote to me regularly. When your mother and I got married, my mother and Helena flew up to Boston for the wedding. Mother never said anything, but I know my father was furious with her. But she always went her own way.

“When you were born, I thought my father would finally soften up a bit. I kept waiting for some response to the telegram I sent as an announcement. Mother, of course, called immediately, but not a word from him.” He stared down at his hands, clenched in his lap. “I waited nearly a year. Then Helena called to tell me that Mother had been very ill with pneumonia and wanted to see me. I left you and your mother in Boston and came down here right away. Mother was very weak, just beginning to recover. For her sake Father was trying hard not to argue with me. He thought there was no way I could be supporting his granddaughter in any suitable manner on what I was making at the time, and I could tell that he was furious with me for your sake, odd as that may sound.”

Unaware that she had done so, Maggie made some small sound of denial, and Gerard squeezed her shoulder reassuringly. She leaned against him and wrapped an arm around him.

He took a deep breath. “I had been here just two days when we had the worst argument ever. Mother was upstairs in her room—she really wasn’t strong enough to leave it—and Father and I had gone into the drawing room right after lunch. I don’t remember now what set him off, but we were going at it hammer and tongs for at least half an hour. One or two people came into the room but left so quickly that, to this day, I don’t know who they were.” He fell silent for a long moment.

“Finally I could see I wasn’t getting anywhere with him—as usual—so I stormed out into the hallway. He followed me and grabbed me by the collar when I ignored him. I swung around and had raised my hand to strike his arm away when I heard Mother cry out for me to stop.”

Now Gerard’s breathing was labored. Maggie pulled away from him in some alarm as he struggled with the memory of what had happened twenty-five years ago. She clasped one of his hands, and he held it like a lifeline.

“I looked up,” he continued shakily, “and there she was at the head of the stairs. She was still very weak, much too weak to be out of bed. She was propped against the banister, because she didn’t have the strength to come all the way down the stairs. Everything about that moment seems so vivid, even after all these years.” He took a deep, steadying breath. “Both Father and I were speechless. I think the sight of her shocked us both back to reality. Then, before either of us could move, she jerked forward suddenly, fell, and started rolling down the steps. By the time I reached her she was dead. The blow on her head when she fell had killed her.”

He was crying silently now, the tears slipping carelessly down his face. For a long moment Maggie was paralyzed by a vision of herself rolling down those cold marble steps. Shakily she reached out to encircle her father’s shoulders with her arms, and the two clung to each other for several minutes until both felt somewhat steadier.

Maggie had no idea what to say. She had never imagined anything like this. But she had to say something to her father. “Did your father”—she couldn’t call him “Grandfather” right now, she just couldn’t—“actually hold you responsible for what happened?”

Gerard looked squarely at her. “For a long time, we both held me responsible. The last words I ever heard her say were ‘Gerard, stop!”’ His shoulders slumped in self-reproach. “How could I blame my father, when I considered myself just as guilty as he did?”

But Maggie could tell from the sound of his voice that Gerard had wanted all along for his father to absolve him of that guilt. Obviously, something had happened during their conversation this afternoon to lessen something of Gerard’s sense of responsibility for his mother’s accidental death, but he wasn’t completely free of the old feeling yet.

“Dad, it was an accident. A very tragic one, but nevertheless it was an accident.” Maggie stroked his arm. “You aren’t to blame.”

He shook his head. “Maybe not. But I didn’t improve the situation any by the way I behaved. ‘Pride goeth before destruction,’ and all that. I was too proud to try to make peace with my father.”

“And it sounds like he was just as bad, refusing to acknowledge your right to choose your own path in life,” she said heatedly. “Why is he any less at fault than you?”

“I know that,” Gerard said quietly. “The rational part of my mind has been telling me that for years, but the irrational part can never forget the way my mother looked just before she fell down those stairs.” He looked away for a moment, toward the portrait of his mother. “But, thank God, this afternoon my father and I did what we should have done years ago. We talked it out, and I guess we more or less forgave each other for what happened.” He laughed sadly. “Age finally accomplished what nothing else could. He’s mellowed, at least a little bit.”

“I’m happy you’ve been able to make your peace with him after all these years.” She hugged him, and he squeezed her back.

“If we both hadn’t been such stubborn jackasses we could have done this a long time ago and saved everybody in the family a lot of grief.” The sudden pain in Gerard’s face made Maggie hurt also. “All the years we lost simply because of pride, not to mention what it cost you—the opportunity to know your family.” He laughed shortly in an attempt to lighten the mood a little. “At least I came by it honestly—my stiff neck, I mean.”

She weakly smiled back, not knowing quite what to say. The reconciliation with his father meant so very much to him, but—and this was the most awful aspect of the situation— even knowing that it had been an accident did little to abate completely the feelings of responsibility.

But a healing process had begun, for which she was thankful. Their decision to come to Mississippi had been a good one. Her father could settle his debts with the past, and they could both look forward to a future which somehow included the rest of the family.