Roses (35 page)

To his surprise, he heard himself say, “How would you feel about my coming to visit you in Belton next weekend?”

She stared goggled-eyed at him. “Percy! You mean it?”

“I mean it,” he said with a laugh.

And so it began.

His mother hovered worriedly in the background. “Do not concern yourself, Mother,” he assured her. “The visits are simply
a distraction.”

“Lucy will not think of your visits as a distraction.”

“I’ve promised nothing.”

“It doesn’t matter. That girl can hear a note of song and take it as a symphony.”

Lucy did not fill his thoughts, his every waking moment, as Mary had done. Indeed, he could go days without once thinking
of her, but she was someone available to share his weekends, someone who made him laugh, pampered his ego, and cared for him
unreservedly without hope of her feelings being returned.

She was a woman of constant surprises. He expected her to be impressed by his wealth but discovered that, apart from its necessity
to provide the essentials, Lucy had little interest in money, especially his. The pleasures she enjoyed were simple and carried
no price tags. She preferred a buggy ride through woods draped in springtime splendor to being squired to a party in Houston
in his new Cadillac, a blackberry hunt to dancing the night away at the country club, a picnic on the banks of the Caddo to
a fine dinner at a grand hotel.

It was during one of these simple excursions that his life turned on an irrevocable course.

They had spread a picnic on a knoll overlooking one of the many lakes in the Belton area. He had come for the weekend, staying
as usual at a boardinghouse whose proprietor now greeted him as a regular visitor. It was June and already hot in East Texas.
Percy loosened his tie, thinking how much he disliked eating outdoors in heat and humidity. Mercifully, the day was overcast,
but as Lucy began to unpack their basket, the clouds parted and the sun’s rays bore down.

“Damn!” he swore. “The sun’s come out.”

“Never you mind,” Lucy said in her unflappable manner. “It’s merely peeped out to see what we’re having for lunch. It’ll go
back in a minute.”

Sure enough, after a quick inspection, the sun disappeared behind clouds and remained hidden all day. Amused, Percy lay back
and watched Lucy set out the picnic items, impressed once again by her original way of looking at things. School was almost
adjourned, and she was thinking of accepting a position at Bellington Hall in Atlanta for the coming year.

He watched her busily piling his plate with sandwiches, cutting him a large slice of chocolate cake she’d baked especially
for him, sugaring his iced tea the way he liked it. “Lucy?” he said. “Will you marry me?”

T
hey married the first of July and honeymooned in the Caribbean for two weeks before returning for Jeremy and Beatrice’s annual
trip to Maine while Percy ran the company. By the time his parents were back in Howbutker from their two months’ respite from
the heat, Percy’s marriage had begun to founder in the unexpected mire of his sexual apathy.

“I simply cannot believe it!” Lucy screamed at him. “The great Percy Warwick with no lightning to his rod! Who would have
thought it? Ollie with one leg shot away has probably got more heft to his barrel than you’ve ever had.”

“Lucy, please be quiet. My folks will hear you,” Percy implored, astonished anew at her familiar command of such language.
Once more, he regretted accepting his parents’ offer of a wing at Warwick Hall as a temporary residence until they could build
a house of their own.

And once more, he caught himself benumbed by the fact that he had married Lucy. “You were vulnerable,” his mother explained,
her look mirroring the despair of Percy’s. “I saw it, but I had no way to protect you. Something has to have caused this sudden
change in Lucy’s feelings for you, Percy. She’s always been so slavishly adoring. Has she found out about you and Mary?”

It was as good an explanation as any. Percy turned away to keep his mother from reading the lie in his eyes. “Yes,” he said.

The truth was that he had lost all desire for Lucy. As was his wont, he had never engaged in the sex act with a woman he did
not like or respect, and he had come to feel neither for Lucy in or out of the marriage bed.

The turn in his affections had not come about inauspiciously. There had been no reason to believe when they left the church
for the cruise ship that the sun would not shine brightly on their future together, especially the physical pleasures of marriage
both were eagerly anticipating. Lucy’s adoring look on that day would have melted the doubt of any man wondering if he’d made
a mistake in marrying a woman to whom he had not yet felt inclined to say, “I love you.”

But his ardor had begun to cool almost from the point of sailing. Lucy, giddy on champagne and her first taste of sex earlier
in their stateroom, had stopped conversation cold at the captain’s table when she pronounced to a matron draped in pearls
and married to a knight of the English realm, “No need to poke about in that shrimp, Lady Carr. They scare the do-do out of
them when they catch them.”

By the last night of the cruise, she had reason to ask when he abruptly extricated himself from her tenacious legs, “What
happened? What went wrong?”

What could he say? That within two weeks he’d come to feel a heart-sinking disrelish for the woman he had married? Her desire
to rut at a change of clothes, her insensibility to his sensibilities, her disinterest in matters cultural or intellectual,
offended him. He was now embarrassed by what had attracted him to her—her salty speech, breezy disregard for convention, and
carefree opinions that flew out of her mouth like random bullets regardless of whom they might strike. He knew himself well.
Despite his own lusty appetites, he was a man of propriety, and it was inevitable that he would carry his distaste to bed.

He muttered an answer: “Nothing, Lucy. It’s just me. I’m tired.”

“From what, for God’s sake? Playing Ping-Pong?” Her aggrieved tone made it clear that once again she’d expected chocolate
cake and been given boiled custard.

His mother had tried to warn him. “That ripe little melon has too many seeds, Percy.”

“True, Mother,” he’d countered, “but the more the seeds, the sweeter the fruit.”

How could he have been so blind… so wrong to have thought he’d be happy with Lucy? He could only believe that his despair
in knowing there would never be another Mary had led him to marry her opposite.

Yet in no way would he allow her to believe the fault of his failure lay with her. The truth would be more devastating than
the lie, and he owed her the lie. She had married him in good faith, believing he accepted her the way she was, while he had
married her for the sole reason that he’d not wanted to be alone when Mary and Ollie came home.

“It’s not you, Lucy; it’s me,” he’d say.

In the first month, tears had marked the aftermath of this admission. After that, stony silence followed, and then one night,
he heard softly in the darkness, “Why don’t you want me, Percy? Don’t you
like
sex?”

Not with you, he thought. He knew he had only to give her the satisfaction she craved to make her bearable to live with, but
husbandly duty or not, he wouldn’t be used as a stud to slake her thirst when all the other pleasures he’d expected from marriage
went begging. With that uncanny ability to read his mind, she said, “You—you
eunuch
! You were supposed to be the best stallion that ever covered a mare. By merely looking at a girl, you could get her to lift
her tail—”

“Oh, Lord, Lucy, your language—”

“My
language
?” With the ball of her foot, she shoved at Percy sitting on the edge of the bed and sent him toppling, his head narrowly
missing a sharp corner of the hope chest at its foot. “Is that your concern in this pathetic situation? My
language
?” Her voice had risen to a shriek. She threw off the covers and stormed around the bed to where Percy, still stunned, sat
naked on the floor, legs sprawled apart, manhood exposed. “What about my pride, my feelings, my needs, my
due
, huh? What about
them
, Percy?” She clutched at him savagely, short fingers curved into pincers.

Percy inched back rapidly, slapping her hand away from its target until he’d regained his feet. It was with great restraint
that he did not strike her, reminding himself that none of this was her fault. He’d married her knowing it was the idol she
loved and not the man. She knew hardly anything about the man, and in the few months of their marriage, she had expended little
energy in learning. It was the idol she struck at now, the idol who had deceived her and crumbled to dust at her feet.

He had thought all of this out at length and determined that what he must do was turn her attention to the man. But after
such episodes, he came to wonder if he had the heart for that, either.

He’d married Lucy believing that eventually he’d grow to love her, but now he hardly remembered the girl with whom he’d been
so taken or why. Her lilting laughter had died, the mischievous twinkle had vanished from her eyes. Her sweet little rosebud
lips were perpetually distorted into the bitterest shapes imaginable. Sadly, blaming himself entirely, he watched the girl
he could have loved disappear before he’d barely glimpsed her.

Reassurance that it was not her fault had given her neither solace nor compassion. “Well, isn’t that mighty white of you,”
she jeered. “You’re damn right it’s not my fault. It’s yours, Percy Warwick. Your reputation has been a lie all these years.
I’ll bet Mary sensed it all along. That’s why she never set her cap for you.”

He preserved a careful inscrutability when she mentioned Mary. Percy wondered how he could have ever thought Lucy fond of
her based on their history together at Bellington Hall. His wife had never cared for Mary at all. Lucy had used her, as she’d
manipulated his parents, to be near him. To his surprise, Lucy had not asked the name of the girl he’d loved and lost to another
man—perhaps because she could not have endured her jealousy—but he saw her sharp eye wander over the faces of women in their
social circle, wondering which one had managed to win his heart. God forbid she should ever discover the woman was Mary. “Hell
hath no fury like a woman scorned” would be a minor description of Lucy.

By the middle of October, confronted as he was each day by her sulks and her physical and emotional battering at night, he
decided to propose an annulment. He was fed up with her obsession with sex, her language, her rages, her resentment toward
his mother, whom she blamed as responsible for his “condition,” as she called it. He’d set her free and pay her expenses the
rest of her life, if she’d only get out of his.

But before he could open his mouth to broach the subject, his wife said, “Get ready for a laugh. I’m pregnant.”

B
eatrice laid Ollie’s cable in her lap and removed her spectacles. She looked across the drawing room at her son pouring the
round of aperitifs the family enjoyed before the nightly meal. Lucy rarely joined in this ritual. Sometimes she did not even
appear for supper. “How nice of Ollie to let us know when they’ll be home. You will serve as the child’s godfather?”

“Of course,” Percy said. “I’m honored to be asked.”

“I know they’ll be glad to be home,” Jeremy said. “Abel can hardly wait to hold that grandson. We’ll have to have something
for them, Beatrice, a little celebration of some kind?”

They all knew the problem. It was Lucy. In her erratic and unpredictable state these days, how could they rely on her to behave
herself at a homecoming party for the DuMonts? “Leave Lucy to me,” Beatrice said, responding to the concern in her husband’s
request. “She’ll cooperate.”

Percy sipped his Scotch. If anyone could handle Lucy, it was his mother, but lately she had begun kicking even those traces.
The early discomforts of pregnancy, coupled with her disgust of him, were driving her to act in ways that even she had not
thought possible. She’d insulted several tradesmen, boxed the ears of the milk delivery boy, and called Doc Tanner a quack
to his face. Several longtime servants had quit, and entertaining had been curbed owing to the uncertainty of Lucy being able
to suffer gladly those fools the Warwicks had tolerated socially for years. Only the restraints of her Bellington Hall training,
awe of her mother-in-law, and a faltering hope for their marriage kept her from popping all her stays, Percy believed. With
Mary and Ollie’s return, all hell might break loose.

But it was still the senior Warwicks’ house and she its mistress, Beatrice maintained. With or without Lucy’s cooperation,
they would throw a party to welcome the DuMonts home.

On the evening of the event, an emergency at the lumberyard called Percy away, and he missed the arrival of the guests of
honor. Invited to come early, they were already seated in the parlor with his parents and Abel, Mary beside the bassinet they’d
brought along, when he appeared in the doorway. Lucy had not come down, he noted with relief. He focused first on Ollie rather
than the lissome figure in ivory who rose with her husband as Percy entered.

“Percy! You old son of a gun!” Ollie exclaimed, grinning from ear to ear as he pushed toward him on his crutches. They embraced
heartily, Percy brought almost to tears by the joy of having him home again.

“Welcome back, old friend,” he said. “You’ve been sorely missed around here, I can tell you.” He turned to Mary. “You, too,
Mary Lamb.”

There was a new look of maturity about her that had settled mainly in her eyes. He would never have believed a woman could
look so beautiful. The soft color of her dress gave her skin the hue of honey and deepened the blackness of her hair, bobbed
now and set off with a headband of ivory sequins.

They did not embrace. Percy had wondered if she would avoid eye contact, but she looked straight into his gaze with an intensity
that broke his heart. Giving him her hand, she said softly, “We’ve missed you, too, Percy. It’s wonderful to be home.” He
lowered his head to kiss her cheek, the one away from the group looking on, and closed his eyes in a small moment of private
grief. Her fingers tightened in his clasp. He pressed them gently and let them go. Turning from her with a smile, he said,
“Now, let’s have a look at the little fellow, shall we?”