The Legacy of Eden (29 page)

“What’s wrong?” I asked her. She turned from me and gazed ahead.

“Back home, hey? Finally allowed now that everyone’s gone.” The bitterness rode through her voice so harshly it made the notes strain. I shrank back, awkward. “Oh, don’t worry. I’m sure I got what I deserved. Mom was nothing if not fair, right?” She smiled at me then, showing the whites of her teeth.

“You can’t be angry with Mom, Claudia.”

“Can’t I?”

“What you did—”

“What I did? What about her?”

“Was she holding a gun to your head?” I asked her. “I remember the stuff you said, how you made him sound, what he did to you? You set him up.”

“I didn’t know what I was doing,” she spat.

“You knew well enough
how
to do it, though.” I stopped and then inexplicably grabbed her by the shoulders. “You’re so defiant even after all this time. Don’t you ever look back and hate yourself for what you did? You think she wanted to do what she did? You left her no choice, Claudia. You’re lucky she didn’t beat the shit out of you, you’d have deserved it.”

“Oh, banishment is so much more feudal. Just tapping into her Italian reserves,” she snarled in my face. Then she lowered her eyes. “Take your hands off me.”

I let her go and sat back in the leather. We fell into silence, neither of us wishing to be the first to break it. She tapped her nails on the steering wheel, I sucked the breath into my cheeks. And then she opened the car door and turned to me.

“Let’s get this over with,” she said.

Chapter 13

A FEW DAYS before Claudia turned fifteen, Piper went into town to choose a birthday present for her. But when she got to the store she began to feel light-headed. It was only for a moment and seemed to pass so she steadied herself and resumed her shopping.

But then when she was only a few miles away from the farm, the light-headedness returned, only this time it was swiftly followed by a searing pain that made the muscles behind her eyes tighten. She swerved from the road, turned off the engine, flung open the car door and threw up. When she eventually returned home, she went straight up to bed and did not have supper. Just before she went to sleep, her sister-in-law came to visit her bearing a mug of hot water with lemon. Piper stared at her from the corner of her eye as she set it on the bedside table.

“There’s no need to look at me like that, Piper. If I’d wanted to poison you I’d have done it before now,” said my grandmother sharply. “I’m sure with a bit of rest you’ll be fine.”

Piper sighed and turned over on her side. Lavinia paused and stared at her back. Then against her better judgment she asked, “What is wrong, Piper?”

“How long do you think we’ll do this?” Piper asked suddenly.

“What do you mean?” Lavinia asked coldly.

“This—working ourselves to the bone? Isn’t it time for another generation to take over, for another one to take up this task? How long do we keep ourselves chained here?”

“I don’t think you are yourself,” my grandmother said slowly. “Give yourself until tomorrow. Things always look better in the morning.”

“Lavinia,” began Piper and the two women held each other’s gaze for a long moment.

“Good night, Piper,” said Lavinia finally and she turned out the light as she left.

“What do you want in life, Merey?”

“I don’t know…to see the world I guess? Maybe go to college and do an art degree or something?”

She reared her head up like a cobra at that, her long hair spilling down her white nightdress so that she took on the visage of some horrifying phantom.

“You’re all so stupid. You think it’s so much better out there, so much more exciting, so much easier. You have no clue. You throw yourselves into exile. Don’t you know what happens when you try to go? You come to the edge of the world and you fall off.”

“How would you know?”

“That’s what happens, Meredith—haven’t you learned that by now?” And she leaned back with a soft laugh.

“I used to tell Claudia that, on those days when she would come to the house and we would sit and talk. You know, when I had her come up to see me when your father died. We would sit and tal. And out of everyone, she knew the most about how much this place meant to us. She would never have left it if she had the choice.”

I stiffened. I knew what was coming but I did not want it, not yet.

“But then she would have done well wherever she was. She was always lucky like that.”

Because of Piper’s illness we missed going to the house that Sunday, so it was nearly ten days before we saw her again. She missed Claudia’s birthday party on the Thursday but seemed to be fully recovered by the weekend so we dutifully made our way over to the main house for Sunday roast as normal. But when I saw her sitting in the living room by the window with a soda water in hand conversing with my grandfather I was visibly shocked. She seemed so thin and pale. Her skin beneath her eyes was wan and the rest of her face took on a chalky pallor. I stopped in the middle of the room and stared at her. Jude came from behind me and gently steered me away to a corner of the room.

“She hasn’t been very well,” he said softly.

“She looks like she is dying,” I muttered.

“She isn’t dying, she’s just…” He bit his lip thoughtfully. “She’s just tired.”

And he shook my shoulders in gentle reassurance and left to talk with my mother. Cal Jr., as if from nowhere, suddenly appeared at my side.

“He’s wrong, you know, it’s a lot worse than that.”

“What would you know?” I snapped.

“Oh, yeah, I only live here. Not that anyone seems to notice.” He rolled his eyes and leaned down to whisper to me, “Wait and see.”

My grandmother came into the room, resplendent as ever, and announced the meal was ready and we dutifully followed her into the dining room.

As we sat and watched our grandfather carve the meat and serve the plates down the table, Ava said, “It’s good to see you looking well again, Aunt Piper.”

Piper gave her a halfhearted smile.

“Oh, she wasn’t at death’s door, were you, Piper?” said my grandmother. “She’s a lot tougher than she looks, Ava.”

“Yeah, it would take a divine force to stop your great-aunt in her tracks,” said my grandfather jovially.

Piper blinked rapidly and chewed the inside of her mouth. “And what would it take to make you stop, Cal?” she asked quietly. Immediately, we all stilled in our seats.

“What do you mean?” asked my grandfather unconcernedly, still finishing off carving a slice of the meat onto a plate, but when she did not answer, he turned and frowned at his sister.

“Piper, are you sure you’re well enough just yet?” asked my grandmother silkily.

Piper licked her lip and then laughed. “Ignore me. I’m still…recovering.”

I looked over at Cal Jr. and watched him hide a smile behind the rim of his glass.

“Your mother was very close to Jude, wasn’t she?” my grandmother asked me. “As were you? Did you miss him when he left?”

I was tempted not to answer her, but I knew from experience that if I didn’t she would bait me until I lost my temper and then laugh at me for the same.

“Yes.”

“He was crying when he left, did you know that? Tears of anger, of anguish. So humiliating for him…” She broke off in a malevolent chuckle. “And I thought to myself, you suffer as you tried to make me suffer.”

She caught me looking at her. “I couldn’t let him get away with it. I couldn’t let him actually do it. After all these years, after everything I have done, lost, sacrificed—my God.” She choked on the last part and began to cough painfully. Her hacking rasps filled the petrified air.

Three years after he had first arrived, and two months after that Sunday dinner with Piper, Jude decided to organize a New Year’s Eve party on Aurelia. He had persuaded my grandfather to throw it because aside from that one time way back when they had first moved in on the farm, they had never thrown another large party. Oh, they had dinner parties and small select guests to private soirees, but not a loud-music, bright-lights, colored-streamer affair for everyone. My grandmother didn’t like to. She didn’t think such affairs were dignified, but it was more than that. She wanted to make Aurelia exclusive, a place that people would give their teeth to set foot on. She thought to share the place would make it less valuable.

But Jude was a grown man and he didn’t need or wish to play by my grandmother’s hierarchical rules. He invited neighbors, suppliers, businessmen my grandparents knew or wished to know. He threw in a whole mix of people under the blanket of fairy lights and rum punch. A week before the party, after coming back from town after one day shopping, my grandmother stalked out to the cornfield and demanded in front of my grandfather for Jude to bring her the guest list. He had burst out laughing.

“What for?” he’d asked.

“Because Claree Tyler couldn’t help but thank me over and over again for asking her to our New Year’s party in the hardware store while her brats were running amok with the chicken feed. It was excruciating. I don’t want people thinking I truck with those kinds of people.”

“What kind of people?” Jude asked benignly. “Widows? Because that’s what she is.”

My grandmother had turned to her husband. “Cal, you understand what I’m saying here. We have a name to protect and this party is going to rest on and more importantly reflect that name.”

“Well, I mean—” He’d rubbed the back of his neck and looked at the floor while his wife shifted her weight to her other foot in irritation. “Who is coming to this thing, Jude?” he had asked.

“Oh, well, there ain’t no list so to speak. Just who takes my fancy. This is a good town here, good people. I promise there won’t be anyone at that party who I wouldn’t want to know.”

“Well, maybe you’re just not as discerning as you should be,” said my grandmother tightly.

“I like to think of it as being open-minded,” Jude said, grinning.

I had such a good time at that party. I got to show off to my classmates the home I had, the one they had heard of and revered and finally now all got to see with their open mouths and wide eyes when I showed them what we took as our right. My grandmother was almost regal in the way she parted crowds and took presents and offered glasses of punch. My grandfather, after some initial anxiety, actually looked like he was enjoying himself. He was jovial, generous, his laughter a boom during the lapse in conversation around us. But Jude was something else. He teased me and my friends, made those who would never normally be associated with my family more at ease, oiled those who usually were as if he had known them as long as my grandparents had. He was so comfortable and he made everyone else feel the same. Even Claudia forgave him whatever grudge she had held against him that night. I saw the two of them share a joke as they leaned against the columns on the foot of the landing’s stairs. Claudia, a vision with her hair spilling over her left shoulder and fringing the top of her dress, smiled down at him. They looked striking, even though for once she didn’t seem to be aware of it. I saw her touch his shoulder and cock her head to the side, laughing. He clinked his punch glass against hers in response.

And then at the end when we had the fireworks display, I thought I would burst with happiness, watching the rockets punch an array of colors into the sky with hisses and crackles and booms that filled the air and covered the sounds of drunken incredulity below.

For my sisters and me, the party was a success. When we came back to school in January, our classmates were still talking about it and for a while there on the street, a whole new cast of people who we hadn’t even known existed before, would smile and nod at us with the glow of both memory and newfound respect.

Do you know, I think that party was one of the proudest moments of my life? When I first really appreciated the family I had standing behind me and I had thought how clever Jude was for orchestrating that, and how much he must have loved us and Aurelia to do it.

It should have made my grandmother love him; it should have made her accept him as one of us. It certainly cemented the bond he had with my grandfather, who the morning after, with the ravages of the party wreaked across his home, had smiled and wondered aloud why they hadn’t done this more often.

But it didn’t.

“Do you remember the party?” she asked. We were sitting in the glade near the garden on the white chairs. I had taken her for a walk. It was a good day for it. She had been quiet that day and restful, so Mom had told me to take her out for a while, when she was still in a compliant mood.

“What party?” I asked.

“The New Year’s one that Jude threw.”

“Yes, I remember.”

“Do you remember who was there?” she asked, looking at me, and I saw in her face a sharpening of memory. She did this sometimes. She could fool you into thinking she was back, but it was only an echo of a voice that had already faded.

“Do you?”

She sighed. “Cal was so naive, so naive. A party—that’s all. Just a party.” She smoothed her hands over her lap.

“It wasn’t?” I asked.

“It wasn’t.”

Among the people at the party had been Mike Grayson and Laurence Caulfield, owners of G&C Foods Limited, a food produce company whose main profit was comprised of the main brand cereals they distributed. They had recently bought a large farm corporation in a neighboring county that would now be put to the directive of producing enough cereals for their growing demand.

I did not know they were there, I did not meet them. But my grandfather did.

They met on the 31st of December 1985 on Aurelia and they met again a month later in the head offices of G&C Foods Limited. And then once more a few weeks after that, and this time Piper was there.

And that is how my grandmother came to do the one thing I have never been able to forgive her for, and what I am sure is the event that has made her spirit haunt my dreams and memories in perpetual unrest. I don’t believe in the God of my mother, or the heaven and hell that were thrust upon me on Sunday mornings, but I do believe somehow that our unfinished business in this life will hold us like an anchor, tying our atoms together in a forcible bind that relives our pain.

A hell of a different making.

And that is where I think Lavinia is, because of what she did to Jude—and to Claudia.

And for what my mother then had to do and never really forgave herself for, even though she would never undo it.

I would discover the truth about my sister during my grandmother’s confessions, and after she instructed me to set fire to all her papers as she neared her end, I would find the letters Claudia had written to her after she’d been sent away: letters full of anger, of remorse, of bitterness and hatred. Of a desperate need for love and conciliation.