Woodburn
Ava had pictured Woodburn as a sleepy little crossroads with Will’s home perched like Graceland at the end of a long avenue of oaks. She was surprised to find a neat, quaint little town with tree-lined brick streets laid out around a square of prosperous shops. The houses, a mixture of antebellum, Victorian, and neoclassical architecture, stood back from the streets across broad landscaped lawns in neighborhoods that formed ever-widening squares around the center of the town.
She stopped at a gourmet kitchen store and bought a gift basket of assorted coffees, ceramic mugs, and tea towels to give to the aunts. All the stores on the square had green awnings and window boxes filled with geraniums. They all faced the statue of the Unknown Confederate Soldier that stood on a pedestal in the middle of a neat lawn scattered with trees and park benches. Ava sat for a while on one of these benches, sipping an iced coffee and watching the shoppers who trolled the storefronts. The town was close enough to Nashville to look prosperous. Will had told her many of the country music millionaires were settling out here.
She also bought a map and spent some time driving through the pleasant neighborhoods. The Woodburns’ house was on a street a few blocks from the square. It was not as grand as she had envisioned it; there were no white columns but instead a deep porch that ran across the front and down one side. Long shuttered windows stood on either side of a graceful mahogany door crowned by a fanlight. The lawn was trimly cut, crowded at the edges with dogwoods and long banks of pink and white azaleas. A graveled drive curved along one side of the house toward a detached garage in the back. A Ford pickup truck was parked in the drive.
Ava drove slowly past, not wanting to appear earlier than the five o’clock Toddy Time. Will had promised to meet her at the house so she wouldn’t have to face the aunts alone.
There were only a few houses along this street, all with expansive lawns and well-maintained exteriors. Each house had its own historical plaque tacked to the front, and the one in front of the aunts’ house read Woodburn Hall, c. 1821. The street sign read River Road, and Ava discovered why when, a block from the house, the street curved sharply to the left and continued along a narrow, swiftly moving river. It was all woods and heavy undergrowth here; the town ended abruptly. Ava followed River Road for perhaps a quarter of a mile, until it intersected a two-lane county highway that crossed the river over a narrow bridge. She turned right onto the highway, crossing the Harpeth River, and drove for a mile or two. It was all farmland here; wide green fields, hazy beneath the afternoon sun, ran along both sides of the highway. She passed a sign that read Longford Plantation—8 miles.
She turned around and headed back, wondering if she might meet Will on the road. She would recognize him immediately, although she hadn’t seen him in nearly four years. She glanced at her closely cropped hair in the mirror. He, of course, would be less likely to recognize her.
William Woodburn Fraser. When they were in college she had teased him once about his middle name being the same as his hometown.
“Why were you named after a town?” she’d asked.
He laughed. “It’s the other way around,” he said.
The truck was still parked in the drive beside Woodburn Hall, and Ava wondered if it might be Will’s. She felt a slight cramp of nervousness in her stomach. Driving slowly along River Road toward the house from this angle, she could see that it was actually quite deep, with a long wing that extended back from the less-imposing facade.
She was tempted, for a moment, to drive past. To keep going. At the last minute she swung into the drive and pulled slowly up behind the truck. She parked and sat staring up at the house.
Will had explained to her that it was his great-great-great-great-grandfather’s summer cottage, built in the early years of the nineteenth century as a retreat. The planters and their families had come to town to socialize and to escape the yellow fever that raged on the plantations in July.
“Some cottage,” she said now to Clotilde.
The apprehension she had felt on the road caused her stomach to quake. She thought, What am I doing here?
Staring up at the house, she found herself wondering why Will had asked her to come, why he had seemed so intent on having her visit him in his own surroundings. It bothered her that she had not posed this question before. She had been so befuddled over her own life that she had not stopped to think about him: his motivations, his desires, the way he might see her. She hoped he had not misread her acceptance of his invitation. She hoped this would not be the end of a perfectly good friendship.
But then the back door swung open and he was coming down the steps to greet her, broad-shouldered and smiling, and she grinned and thought, It’ll be okay.
He had filled out in the four years since she had seen him last. The change suited him. She had forgotten how good-looking he was, or perhaps this was something she had never, for some reason, noticed. She was sorry now that she had cut her hair. He’ll think I’m plain, she thought.
“I like your hair,” he said, giving her a brief, fierce hug.
“I had a moment of insanity,” she said, running her fingers self-consciously through the short spikes.
“No, really. It suits you.”
She went around to the trunk of the car to get her suitcase.
“Here, let me get that,” he said. He had noticed the vase in the passenger seat; she saw his eyes flicker curiously over Clotilde’s final resting place, but he said nothing.
She stood with her hands shielding her eyes, staring up at the house. “This is some cottage,” she said. Her attention was caught by a slight movement at one of the upstairs windows, an arm drawing aside a curtain, but when she looked again, it was gone, and the curtain was still.
He closed the trunk. “We can get everything else later, once you’re settled.” He wore a blue shirt, rolled at the sleeves, and his hair curled damply against his collar.
“They’re all waiting for you in the library,” he said, and she thought she detected a slight nervousness in his voice.
She followed him up a brick sidewalk and a short flight of stairs, into a narrow screened porch that ran across the back of the house. A door to the left opened into the kitchen, and a door to the right opened into a small bedroom that had once served as the cook’s room. All this Will told her as they climbed the stairs. He seemed to be trying to put her at ease, speaking in that low, pleasant voice he used with her sometimes. Or perhaps it was himself he was trying to put at ease. He explained that Fanny and Josephine were waiting for them, as was Fanny’s husband, Maitland. All three she had met at his graduation from Bard. They had also invited Clara McGann and Alice Barron, both childhood friends and neighbors of the aunts, to come over later.
“You’ll like them,” he assured her.
“How long does the drinking go on?”
He grinned at her over his shoulder. “You mean Toddy Time? It ends precisely at six o’clock and then there’s supper.”
She grinned. “Served by liveried footmen, no doubt.”
“You’ve been reading too many romance novels. There are no liveried footmen, no servants at all, I’m afraid.” He opened a pair of French doors that led into the main hall. The doors were quite tall, and the top halves were made with long wavy sheets of heavy glass. They looked like they might have come from a country house in Provence.
“Gracious, you’re not bringing her in the back way, are you?” someone called out.
Will closed the doors behind them. He put his hand on her back as if to steady her. His touch was warm, pleasant, mannerly. Authoritative in a quietly masculine way.
They stood in a center hallway that ran from the front door to the screened porch at the back. The hall was wide enough for various pieces of heavy antique furniture. Stepping into the house was like stepping into Alice’s looking glass; all scale and proportion seemed off. Viewed from the outside the house did not seem so extensive and imposing, but the interior was very large and grand, with high ceilings and spacious, ornately furnished rooms opening off the expansive center hallway. Scattered oriental rugs deadened their footsteps as they walked along the darkly polished, wide-planked floor. The house was very stately and well cared for, and yet there was a certain chill to the air, Ava noticed, an uneasy sensation that old houses sometimes convey, of ancient tragedy and loss.
“They’re here, they’re here!” someone cried, and a moment later, Fanny burst through one of the doorways and came hurrying down the hallway, her hands fluttering around her skirt like a covey of rising doves. Her red-gold hair was cut in a stylish bob, and she looked even younger than Ava remembered, with her pale skin and large gray eyes. Ava had no time to examine her further, for she found herself pulled suddenly into a fragrant embrace. “We’re so glad you’ve come,” Fanny said in her ear, then stepped back, squeezing Ava’s hands before letting them go.
“Thank you for having me,” Ava said. She suddenly remembered the gift basket. “Oh, wait, I have something for you in the car.”
“Don’t worry about that right now,” Fanny said, taking Ava’s arm and steering her down the hallway.
“Come and have a drink,” Josephine called.
She was sitting on a long sofa in the library and she rose, smiling, her eyes resting lightly on Ava’s face, and yet managing to encompass all of her in that glance, from the tips of her toes to the ends of her short spiky hair. “We’re so glad you could come,” she murmured, putting her hand out to Ava. Her skin was cool and smooth to the touch. Like her sister, she was slim, and her hair was cut stylishly, although she did not color it, and it curved like two snowy wings on either side of her handsome face.
“And who’s this pretty thing?” Maitland bellowed, standing beside a tall sideboard laden with decanters and glassware and a silver cocktail shaker. He strode quickly across the room, pulling Ava into a clumsy embrace and kissing her loudly on both cheeks.
“Oh, Mait, don’t crush her!” Fanny cried but he only laughed and said, “I kiss all the pretty girls!” His accent was nearly unintelligible to Ava, much more hurried and softly rounded than the aunts’, as if he spoke through a mouthful of marbles. He was stylishly dressed in pleated trousers and a blue shirt. He wore a sport coat and a tie, and a pair of leather loafers.
He rubbed his hands together fiercely. “Now, what can I get you?” he said to Ava, indicating the decanters on the sideboard.
They were drinking something call a Gin Rickey, which Ava gathered from their conversation they had learned to drink in the twenties up at Vanderbilt. “We made it in the bathtub,” Fanny said gaily, lifting her rocks glass.
“We didn’t make it,” Josephine said mildly. “We bought it from bootleggers who did. It was during Prohibition.”
Ava looked around the room in astonishment. “You went to college in the nineteen-twenties?” she said.
“I was sixteen when I went up to Vanderbilt in 1927,” Josephine said. “In those days you finished high school at sixteen.”
Ava stared blankly at Josephine. “But that would make you—”
“Oh, I know. Don’t say it,” Fanny cried.
“Eighty-seven,” Josephine finished serenely. “Fanny is eighty-five and Maitland is eighty-seven.”
“But none of you look a day over seventy,” Ava said, and Will laughed nervously.
“Up at Sewanee we drank Singapore Slings,” Maitland said, and it was not too hard to imagine him as a college boy dressed in white bucks and a coonskin coat. He had the look of a perpetual college boy about him, jovial and outgoing. He was perched on the arm of a low sofa, sitting next to Fanny, who had her knees crossed, her drink resting on her lap. She had remarkable legs for a woman her age, astonishingly good legs. Josephine sat at the opposite end, the hand holding her drink resting lightly on the raised arm of the sofa. Both aunts wore tailored skirts and blouses and, looking down at her jeans and flip-flops, Ava felt badly underdressed.
She sat down in a wingback chair, trying desperately to drink her Gin Rickey, and looked around the spacious library. All her life she had wanted a room like this. Floor-to-ceiling bookshelves of a light blonde color stood along three walls, and a massive fireplace stood in the middle of the fourth paneled wall. All the furniture in the room was pulled away from the walls so one could reach the shelves unimpeded. There were literally hundreds of books; a sliding ladder on a rail allowed access to the very top shelves.
“What a wonderful room,” Ava said.
“Are you a reader?” Josephine asked.
“Oh, yes.”
“So was Papa,” Fanny said. “He and Josephine used to sit for hours in here on a rainy day with their noses buried in some dusty book. Now Will and I,” she said, looking fondly at Will, who was seated in a leather club chair across from Ava. “We were never too fond of reading. Board games and jigsaw puzzles were our favorite ways to spend rainy days.”
“And what do you do on rainy days?” Ava asked Maitland.
“I mix the drinks.”
She smiled and lifted her Gin Rickey in acknowledgment. Ava was not a big drinker—she preferred red wine when she drank anything—but she didn’t want to hurt Maitland’s feelings. He seemed to take his duties as cocktail master seriously.
“So Vanderbilt accepted women in the twenties?” she asked. Despite the cheerful appearance of the rows and rows of books, she was struck again by an odd, fleeting sense of melancholy. Houses have personalities just like people, she had learned in her years of traveling, and this one felt somber and dispirited. More like Thornfield Hall than Pemberley House.
“Oh, before that,” Josephine said. “In the eighteen-eighties, actually. They were very progressive.”
“Although women were not awarded degrees,” Fanny said. “At least not initially. They were allowed to audit classes but no degrees were conferred.”
Ava pretended to sip her drink. “It must have been unusual for women in your generation to attend college.”
“It wasn’t unusual for women of our—” Fanny began and then stopped, and Josephine finished smoothly, “It wasn’t unusual for women in our family, our friends, to attend college.”
“It’s amazing how much has changed over the last hundred years,” Ava said. “Women’s liberation, the Civil Rights movement, the improvements in science and technology.” She was rambling; she always did that when she was nervous, and it often ended badly, with her saying something inappropriate or pointless.
The others stared past her, their faces fixed in polite expressions.
“I often feel that our forefathers must be turning in their graves,” Josephine said, lifting her glass to Maitland, who was pouring refills.
Fanny, who had been smiling at Ava with a dreamy expression, said, “You have the loveliest hair. Were your people Scottish?”
“My people?” Ava said.
“Your family,” Will said.
“Oh. Well, actually, I don’t know a lot about my family. My parents came from Detroit originally. I think. My mother’s maiden name was Govan, which sounds Irish, but I really don’t know. She never spoke of her family. Dabrowski has to be Polish.” She smiled at Maitland but indicated that she didn’t need a refill.
“Polish!” Fanny said. “How lovely! I don’t think I’ve ever known anyone who was Polish.”
Ava turned her attention to one of the framed photographs on the coffee table. They seemed to be waiting for her to say something else and when she didn’t, Josephine turned her head and spoke to Maitland in a low voice about supper.
There were photographs everywhere, on all the tables in the room and on the bookshelves; the paneled wall around the fireplace was covered in them. Ava stood up and slowly made her way around the room clutching her unfinished drink in her hand, stopping to peer at the images. Some were in color but most were in black and white. A good many were of Fanny and Maitland in their younger days: standing in front of Niagara Falls, landing in a seaplane on Puget Sound, on the beach at Cannes, sitting in a café in Provence. Their life together seemed to have involved a great deal of travel. And drinking. There were photos of them in the Adirondacks, a cocktail table displayed prominently in the foreground; Maitland dressed in evening clothes holding a cocktail shaker and two glasses; Fanny, in a very short skirt, balancing a martini glass on her nose. Mixed in with the gay travel photos were Victorian family portraits: sepia-tinted prints of somber, bearded men and women in long white dresses and huge hats. Ava picked up a photo of three young girls, startling in their prettiness and resemblance to one another. They wore white dresses and large bows in their hair, which fell in ringlets down their backs.
“My sisters and I,” Josephine said. “Celia, the baby, was Will’s grandmother. She died when Will’s mother was still a girl.”
“She was lovely,” Ava said. “You were all lovely.”
“Oh, don’t look at those old things,” Fanny said. “It was so long ago I can scarcely remember.”
“Not so long ago as all that,” Maitland said gallantly, and Fanny, pleased, gave him a coquettish smile. They were so sweet with each other, married all this time and still acting like newlyweds. Ava hoped she would be so lucky. As if reading her thoughts, Will, sitting across the room with his empty glass resting on one knee, caught her eye and smiled.
She picked up another photo, this one of a young woman dressed in a shimmering dress, her hair parted smoothly and coiled at the nape of her neck. She was very slender and lovely, but her eyes were cold, and there was a haughty expression on her face, as if she knew and disapproved of the photographer. Ava recognized Josephine, a much younger Josephine, her chin tilted slightly upward, eyes heavy-lidded, caught somewhere between an expression of boredom and reproach.
At that moment there was the sound of a door closing and then a female voice called out, “Hello! Anybody home?”
“We’re in here,” Will called; he and Maitland stood and a moment later two women appeared in the doorway. They were both well dressed and appeared to be roughly the same age as the aunts, and Ava was struck again by the smooth, beautiful complexions of these Southern women. It made her wonder if there was a mysterious Fountain of Youth hidden somewhere on the grounds, something secretive and transforming known only to the women.
Will introduced Ava to Alice Barron and Clara McGann. Alice was Maitland’s widowed sister, and she lived next door with her son, Fraser. “I grew up with these two,” Alice said, indicating Fanny and Josephine. “We were girls together.”
“We were all girls together,” Clara said. Her skin was a pale mocha color, and her eyes were green. She held Ava’s hand for a moment, gazing at her curiously. “The resemblance is remarkable,” she said.
“I noted it when she first came in,” Josephine said.
“What?” Fanny said, excited by their tone. “Her resemblance to whom?”
“Delphine,” Alice said.
“Who’s Delphine?” Ava said.
“My great-great-great-great-grandmother,” Will said.
They took her into the dining room to show her the oil painting of Delphine Woodburn. She was dark-haired and dark-eyed, and Ava saw little resemblance between them but she was too polite to say anything.
“She was French,” Alice said to Ava. “Are you French?”
“No,” Josephine said. “Polish. And Irish.”
“Well, I don’t really know what I am,” Ava began lamely, feeling her face flush. “I didn’t know it mattered.”
“It doesn’t,” Will said quickly.
“Randal married her in 1816 and brought her here from New Orleans,” Josephine said. Behind Josephine’s shoulder, on the wall facing her, Ava could see the portrait of Randal Woodburn, the patriarch. He was an exceedingly handsome man, with pale eyes beneath heavy brows and a wide, sensuous mouth. His hair was worn long over a high, starched collar, and his shoulders were wide beneath his buttoned coat. He was the very picture of masculine virility, yet there was something about his face, a hint of cruelty about the eyes, that Ava didn’t like.
“They were devoted to each other,” Josephine said, gazing at Randal’s portrait.
“She bore him sixteen children,” Alice said.
“Oh, everyone loves a good love story, don’t they?” Fanny said brightly, her eyes resting briefly on Maitland.
“Look at us, chattering like a bunch of old women while this child is probably bored to tears,” Clara said, sliding her arm around Ava’s waist and leading her back to the library. “That’s all we old folks have left, our stories.”
“Oh, I like stories,” Ava said.
Behind her, Josephine said quietly, “You’ve come to the right place then.”
After supper Will showed her to her room and helped her get her things settled. He brought in her box of books and her laptop, and she brought Clotilde, setting her on the mantel beneath a painting of red-coated hunters on the trail of a fox. The horses were all drawn with the small, sleek heads and long, tapering limbs common to the nineteenth-century style, and the human figures, too, seem disproportionate.
Will noted her careful positioning of Clotilde’s vase on the mantel, but again he said nothing, sliding his eyes away politely as he began to unpack her books. She liked that about him, that although he seemed curious about her, he did not push her to confide in him. He was patient. He seemed content to let her make the first move.
The aunts and Clara and Alice had no such qualms. They had questioned Ava relentlessly over supper, although they were so good at it, so discreet at making inquiries in an offhand, roundabout way, that Ava did not realize until the interrogation was over that she had been thoroughly cross-examined. She was not one to spill her guts to strangers, yet in the space of less than an hour she had confessed much of her dysfunctional gypsy childhood, the fact that she had been raised without religion, had never known her father, had had a series of unfortunate love affairs, and although relatively well educated, had wound up in a job she detested. By the time they rose from the table, Ava felt as if she’d been prodded and poked by unseen fingers. She also felt that Josephine and Alice, in their subtle investigation of her past, had found her somewhat lacking.
“Through that door is a small office I thought you might use,” Will said, pointing to a door she had mistaken for a closet. It stood between the fireplace and a glass-fronted secretary filled with rows and rows of leather-bound books. The room they stood in was far grander than any bedroom Ava had ever slept in. A tall four-poster bed flanked by a mahogany armoire and a lowboy chest stood against one wall, opposite the fireplace. At one end, long shuttered windows overlooked the garden.
“Actually, I thought I might set my laptop up here,” Ava said, pointing to a table and a pair of leather chairs that stood in front of the windows.
“The light will be better,” he agreed. “And you’ll have a nice view of the garden.”
“Yes.” Ava strolled over, peering between the slats. She had noticed the wrought-iron fence when they came up the back steps, but in the dim light of early dusk she could see now that it surrounded a garden that was very wide and deep, set back from the side porch across a patch of lawn.
“Your great-aunts must have green thumbs,” Ava said. Swift black shapes flitted across the lawn. Bats, she thought.
“It’s mainly Clara. She loves to garden.”
“Oh?” She turned and looked at him in surprise. “Does she live here, too?”
“No. She lives in a cottage behind the property.” He set her laptop down on the table and stacked her books on one corner. “The closet is here,” he said, opening a corner cupboard. “It’s small, of course, because these old houses were built without closets. They were all added later.” He walked over and opened the door to the adjoining office. “Feel free to store anything you don’t need in here. My great-grandfather, Colonel James Woodburn, used it as an office. He was Josephine and Fanny’s father.”
She followed him into the narrow, paneled room. At one end a long window overlooked the garden and at the other end, a door opened into the center hallway of the house. An old-fashioned desk with a drop front and various cubbyholes stood along one wall, topped by a glass cabinet filled with large leather-bound books.
She was aware suddenly of the close atmosphere of the room and the fact that the two of them seemed to fill it so completely.
“It’s claustrophobic in here,” he said apologetically, stepping aside so she could edge her way over to the desk. “I hadn’t realized that. It was used as an office, although at one time I’m guessing it was a dressing room. I thought it would be a quiet place to write.”
She opened the cabinet and took out one of the books, realizing that they were journals, each with dates written in a flowing script.
“Those are the farm journals,” he said, “kept by the owners of Longford, the first Woodburns in the county. In those days farmers kept journals to use as guides for planting and harvesting.” Farm. Farmers. She noted how careful he was not to use the words plantation and planters.
The date on the first one read 1826. “Oh, my God,” she said, opening it reverently. “I can’t believe you have treasures like this just lying around.”
He grinned. “It’s my aunts’ doing, I’m afraid. The whole house is like a museum, but they won’t part with any of it. They like their old things around them.”
“I don’t blame them.”
“No?” he said, giving her a mocking, tender smile.
She peered intently at one of the entries, trying to read the archaic script. The words came suddenly into view, seeming to leap off the yellowed paper.
November 4th. Clear and cold. Commenced digging slips around 8 a.m. Got in 4 banks of leathercoats, pumpkin, Spanish and reds.
The baby was quite sick this morning. Gave her a little vitriol. Captain D. Sinclair stopped and took tea with me. Heard that James Fraser’s child died of scarlet fever.
“The ledgers used to be kept at Longford, but after Reconstruction the family moved into town. Longford was rented out to tenant farmers and that’s why the books were moved here.”
“When am I going to see Longford?”
“Tomorrow, if you like. I thought we’d go after breakfast.”
She looked up at him, returning his smile. “I’d like that.” She closed the ledger and slid it carefully back onto the shelf. “You don’t mind if I read some of these, do you?”
“Of course not. Read anything you want, although you’ll probably find more to your liking in the library.”
“Trust me, I’ll see plenty of the library. The trouble will be pulling me away so I can get some work done.”
“I’ll do my best to keep you on track.” He leaned over and kissed her cheek, a very chaste and brotherly kiss. She followed him out into the bedroom, shutting the office door behind her.
“If you get bored there’s a TV in the library,” he said.
“Thanks. But I’ll be too busy exploring this incredible house to get bored.”
He stopped in the doorway, his hand on the jamb. “And don’t worry about the aunts. They know you’re here to write and they’ll leave you alone. No one will bother you.”
Despite her intention to explore the house, Ava was tired, and after Will left she went into the bathroom at the end of the hall to get ready for bed. Coming out into the darkened hallway, she stood for a moment listening to the gentle sighs and creaks of the old house settling around her. The front porch lights were on, falling through the fanlight and dimly illuminating the front half of the hall. The back half was cloaked in shadow. Above her she could hear the distant thuds of Maitland and Fanny and Josephine readying themselves for bed.
She went into her brightly lit bedroom, wandering around and peering at the treasures she found there, snuffboxes and ceramic thimbles and oil paintings of ancient hunting scenes: dogs with brightly feathered birds in their mouths, and men on horseback in pursuit of some hapless fox.
She stopped at the mantel, looking around her.
The room reflected pleasure and comfort and social prominence. It reeked of old money.
“I wish you could see me now,” she said aloud to Clotilde.
Not that Clotilde would have been impressed, of course. Clotilde was never impressed by material possessions. “They’re just things, Ava,” she always said when Ava exclaimed over some rich classmate’s house. “They don’t matter in the end.”
And yet some things had mattered. Clothes, for instance. No matter how broke they were, Clotilde always saw to it that they were well dressed. She disdained bargain department stores in favor of Junior League thrift shops, where they could pick up last year’s good-quality clothes, some barely worn, for a fraction of what they cost new. Anyone looking at them would never have guessed how they lived.
It was the heavy material trappings that Clotilde had cared nothing for: a house, furniture of their own, a car with less than 200,000 miles. She had died with a closet full of beautiful clothes and less than two hundred dollars in the bank. She had left behind a rusty Subaru, a stack of unpaid bills, and a shoebox filled with relics.
She had died alone.
Ava felt a sharp cramp in her stomach. She stretched her hands out on either side of the vase, grasping the mantel and looking down at her feet, waiting for the spasm of pity and remorse to pass.
She dreamed that night that she was skating on a frozen lake. The air was cold and prickly against her face, and she was flying over the ice like a bird, hurrying away from some danger she couldn’t see but could only vaguely sense. Behind her the ice was cracking, shifting, and she knew that whatever was chasing her was near. She could feel it breathing on her neck. Startled, she pressed on, but she found now that her legs felt heavy and her feet felt as if they were being slowly encased in ice. She struggled with the rising chill that seemed to be overtaking her, and as she did, she looked down in horror at her feet.
There beneath the rippled surface of the ice, a face stared back at her.
She awoke with a start. Moonlight flooded the room, falling between the slats of the shuttered windows. In the distance, a train rumbled mournfully. The horror of the dream gradually faded, and she turned her head repeatedly, assuring herself that it was just a dream and nothing more. Only a dream.
She turned her head and studied the massive mahogany furniture of the room. “Made by the people on Longford,” Josephine had told her. Not slaves, but people. The word people down here carried some kind of tribal significance. What was it they had asked her? “Where do your people come from?” As if Ava, who barely knew her own mother, who knew nothing of her father, should be able to explain the whereabouts of her ancestors. Southerners, who had stayed in the same small town for generations, seemed to take it for granted that the experiences of the rest of the country would mirror those of their own narrow world. No, not Southerners. She knew too few of them to be able to make such sweeping generalizations. Woodburns. Landed gentry. She had read about them in English novels but had never, until this evening, understood exactly what the term, with all its historical and socioeconomic connotations, meant. The Woodburns were like something from a Jane Austen novel.
No, not Austen, she thought, remembering the face under the ice.
One of the Brontë sisters, more likely.
When she awoke again it was nearly nine o’clock. Sunlight flooded the room, falling between the window slats and making geometric patterns on the dark floor. There was a scent of coffee and frying bacon in the air, and Ava could hear movement deep within the house, the clinking of china and silverware.
Coming out of her room, she stood for a moment in the sunny hallway, listening to the muffled sounds of the house. The lingering sense of melancholy she had felt yesterday seemed to have dissipated in the bright sunlight. The house seemed even more splendid than it had last night. Will had given her a tour, and she had passed in openmouthed amazement from room to room, but seen now in the brilliance of a summer morning, the shutters open, light flooding the large rooms and pooling against the darkly polished floors, Ava was amazed anew at the stunning elegance of the old house.
The ceilings on the first floor were twelve feet high and trimmed with ornate plasterwork. At one end of the wide central hallway, near the front door, a graceful staircase rose to the second floor. The rooms opening off the central hallway were expansive and filled with antique furniture, most of it in the Empire style. Oil portraits of dead ancestors hung on the walls. All the interior doors were massive, eight feet tall and nearly four feet wide. (“Wide enough so ladies in their hoop skirts could pass through,” Josephine had told Ava.) They were solid mahogany and, like the furniture, had been made at Longford. Oriental carpets covered the dark heart pine floors. A massive French gilt mirror graced one of the walls of the hallway, a place where the women of the house used to stand to check their wide skirts before venturing out. “If only that mirror could talk,” Fanny had said gaily to Ava, “what stories it could tell!”
She walked slowly through the dining room beneath the watchful eyes of Randal and Delphine, stopping to look at the many objects of interest. Along one wall, built-in glass-fronted cabinets housed an extensive collection of sterling silver. Several smaller sideboards held silver tea trays, jam pots, and ornate obsolete utensils. She stopped and peered at a gilt-framed letter hanging on a wall between two long windows. The script was barely legible but the signature was vaguely familiar.
As if sensing her presence, Will came through the butler’s pantry, whistling cheerfully. “Good morning,” he said.
“Morning.” She turned her attention back to the letter, tapping the glass with one finger. “Thomas Jefferson,” she said. “I recognized the signature. This is a very good replica.”
He smiled faintly, an apologetic yet vaguely defiant smile. “That’s no replica,” he said. “He and my great-grandfather Randal were friends.”
She stared in amazement, then turned and followed him through the butler’s pantry into the sunny kitchen.
Josephine was standing at the sink, an apron tied around her narrow waist. “There you are,” she said, as if she had been waiting for Ava. She was wearing a pair of yellow rubber gloves. “Are you hungry?”
“Yes,” Ava said, surprised. “I am.” She never ate breakfast in Chicago—she usually wasn’t hungry until lunch—but the delicious smells had awakened in her a ravenous appetite.
“There’s a plate for you on the stove. And coffee in the percolator.” Josephine nodded at the gleaming pot on the counter, glancing at Ava’s bare feet.
“Good morning!” Fanny called brightly. She, Clara, and Alice were sitting in the small sunny breakfast room off the kitchen. A large tabby cat slept on Fanny’s lap. Ava poured herself a cup of coffee and, collecting her plate, went to join them.
Will pulled out a chair for her and then sat down beside her. He seemed shy around her this morning. Attentive but unsure of himself. She was awkward, too, looking at the long-limbed man beside her and trying to remember the boy she’d known in college. She remembered the brotherly kiss he had given her and the jaunty way he had said goodnight.
“We’re being lazy,” Fanny said, stroking the cat, but Ava noted that they were all dressed except for her. Fanny wore a blue dress and Clara wore a pair of jeans and a red sweater. Ava was still in flannel shorts and a faded T-shirt, her usual sleeping attire.
“Sorry,” Ava said, running her fingers through her hair and glancing around the table. “I’m not really a morning person.”
“You’re on vacation,” Will said. “You’re entitled to sleep in if you want to.”
They had set a place for her, although it was clear that everyone else had finished breakfast some time ago. The table was cleared except for their coffee mugs and a pair of silver jam pots that Alice placed in front of Ava with a faint smile. Alice wore a coral-colored tennis warm-up with a flower-shaped diamond brooch on one lapel. Her dark blonde hair was cut close around her narrow face.
“As long as I don’t make it a habit,” Ava said. She had planned on rising early and finishing the outline for her new novel, a coming-of-age story about a girl and her mother traveling around the Midwest, before heading out to Longford with Will.
“It’s going to be a scorcher,” Fanny said, staring out the window. “Why, I can’t remember a time when it’s been this hot in May unless it was that summer all those years ago when the strange insects dropped out of the trees and the river was swollen with the rains. You remember, Sister. The summer of—” She stopped, a curious expression on her face.
“Yes,” Josephine said quickly. “I remember.”
“We thought we might take a drive,” Will said to the table at large. “Out to Longford.”
“Such a pretty day for a drive,” Fanny said. Alice and Clara looked at Fanny and she blushed suddenly, a deep crimson color.
Josephine stood in the doorway, wiping her hands on her apron. “Try the blackberry jam,” she said to Ava. “It’s made locally.”
Ava ate while the other four women talked quietly about an upcoming barbecue. Will stared out the large windows, his hand curled casually around an empty coffee cup. He had told her last night that he was renovating Longford, trying to update the house while remaining true to the architectural period. Upon being further pressed as to what he did for a living (she gathered from his demeanor that this wasn’t something she should have asked), he admitted that he flipped the occasional house and had been involved for some time in a local company that manufactured parachutes. He had sold that business, he told her, when he began the renovations on Longford. The reality, of course, was that he didn’t have to do anything and they both knew it.
“It won’t take me long to get ready,” Ava said to him, spreading her toast with blackberry jam.
“I’m in no hurry.” He gave her a brief smile and then glanced up at Josephine, who remained standing in the doorway. “Aunt Jo, do you think those blueprints might be up in the attic?”
“The plans for Longford? Possibly. I know there was a set that was given with the family papers to Vanderbilt. But there are still several old trunks and boxes I haven’t had time to go through.”
He rose, touching Ava lightly on the shoulder. “I’ll be back,” he said. He walked through the butler’s pantry into the dining room and a moment later they could hear his footsteps on the stairs.
“The attic?” Ava said, looking around with interest. Outside the breakfast room window, a profusion of hydrangea blooms pressed against the glass panes.
“Don’t go up there,” Fanny said, shuddering so that the cat opened its eyes and regarded Ava lazily. “It’s a morbid place.”
“One of our ancestors was a doctor,” Josephine said before Fanny could say anything else. “You can still see the outline of the staircase that once stood at the rear of the house. He used to occasionally see patients up there.”
“He was an anatomist,” Alice said. “A vivisectionist.”
“He was a man of science,” Josephine said. “Of natural curiosity. And in those days anatomy was a relatively new field of study. An unpleasant thing to be talking about at any time but especially over the breakfast table.” She glanced severely at Alice and Fanny as if to put an end to the discussion.
“I can’t imagine why he was allowed to perform his grisly experiments in the house,” Clara said, ignoring her. “That’s the part I’ve never understood, why Randal and Delphine would have allowed that.”
“Experiments?” Ava said.
“Dissections.” Fanny shivered again and the cat arched his back and yawned.
“It was illegal in those days,” Alice said. “Dissection. He had to pay grave robbers to bring him bodies in the middle of the night.”
“Resurrection men,” Clara said.
“Oh, for goodness’ sake!” Josephine said, one of the veins in her temple showing blue against her pale skin.
“He was one of Randal and Delphine’s two sons who survived,” Fanny explained blithely to Ava. “Great-Uncle Jerome. Out of sixteen children, they only had four who lived to adulthood. Great-Uncle Jerome, Grandfather Isaac, Great-Aunt Louisa, and Great-Aunt Sophia.”
“That’s terrible,” Ava said.
“Not so uncommon in those days,” Alice said.
“I was terrified of the attic,” Fanny said, stroking the cat and staring pensively through the window. “Papa used to keep it locked. We weren’t allowed to play up there. It was above the nursery where Josephine and Celia and I used to sleep as girls, and at night I could hear things moving around up there.”
“Oh, Fanny!” Josephine said, glancing sharply at her. “You were always so fanciful as a girl.”
Fanny tilted her head with a mildly surprised expression. “Was I?” she said.
Ava chewed her toast, aware suddenly of an undercurrent of tension in the room. She thought of the nightmare that had awakened her in the middle of the night, but like all nightmares it had already begun to fade, and she could remember only snatches of it now, a fleeting impression of fear and speed and glittering water.
“Listen to us going on about things that happened so long ago as if it were only yesterday,” Josephine said briskly, taking off her apron and folding it neatly over the back of a chair.
“You’ll have to get used to that in this house,” Clara said to Ava, patting her hand. “The past mixed up with the present.”
“I don’t mind,” Ava said.
As if to change the subject, Josephine said, “Will tells us you’re a writer.”
Ava coughed lightly and put her fist to her mouth. It was the moment she had come to dread, her stilted confession of being a writer, followed by the inevitable moment of silence and then the bright retort, “Oh, really! What do you write?” She could never seem to pull it off.
“I’m working on a novel,” she said. “A coming-of-age story set partially in Chicago.”
“How wonderful,” Josephine said.
“I do love a good English mystery,” Alice said. “Murder in the rose garden by the crazy vicar, that sort of thing.”
“Agatha Christie is good,” Clara agreed. “But Zora Neale Hurston, now she could tell a story.”
Fanny, who had been sitting quietly, said abruptly, “You know Zelda Sayre was a writer.” They all looked at her. She smiled at Ava. “She was a distant cousin of ours on our mother’s side. Zelda was such a lovely girl, so full of life and laughter and high spirits! Sister visited them in Paris in ’29”—here Fanny glanced at Josephine—“and found Zelda very much changed.”
“I shouldn’t wonder,” Alice said darkly. “Married to that scoundrel.”
“Wait just a minute.” Ava held up one finger. She shook her head delicately. “Zelda Sayre? Are you talking about Zelda and F. Scott Fitzgerald? As in The Great Gatsby? As in Tender Is the Night?”
Fanny put the cat down and stood up, and a few minutes later she was back with a photograph of an unsmiling Josephine dressed in a fur-collared coat and a cloche hat, standing next to Zelda and F. Scott Fitzgerald in front of a Paris café. The Fitzgeralds looked small and chastened beside the tall and somber Josephine, as if her presence diminished them in some way. Ava stared at the photograph in amazement, trying to fathom the Woodburn legacy: a house filled with antiques and memorabilia most museums would envy; a family history of wealth and privilege tied to the same landscape for generations; dazzling family connections.
Once, in a moment of unexpected candor, Clotilde had told Ava the true story of how she and Ava’s father, Frank, had met. She had told Ava a hundred different versions of this event but somehow this one felt like truth. They had met on a Boblo boat during a cruise on Polka Night. The boat was on its way to Boblo Island, an amusement park in the middle of the Detroit River, and her mother had gone with a friend to hear Mitch Ryder and the Detroit Wheels. Frank was there with friends from the line at Ford where he worked and he asked her to dance and later escorted her around the park, where they rode the Wild Maus and the Super-Satellite Jet. Clotilde told her, “I didn’t even like him at first. He had big feet, and his hands smelled of lemon soap. But he was persistent and he wore me down eventually.”
It was that detail of the lemon soap that had given the story its authenticity. Clotilde was a palm reader, and Ava could imagine her flipping Frank’s hand over to peruse its secrets. Picturing this, Ava had felt a sudden dizzying awareness of her parents as they must have been at that time in their young, hopeful lives. She had visualized the two of them, good-looking and wary, the whir of the giant machinery, the lights glittering on the water, the distant strident sounds of the band.
At that moment her imagined life, intertwined with the lives of these two strangers, had felt fateful and expansively heroic. But now, looking down at Josephine standing next to Zelda and F. Scott Fitzgerald, she could see what a small, inconsequential thing her family history really was.
“Zelda was the better writer of the two,” Alice said. “That was the tragedy of the whole thing. She was the better writer, and his jealousy drove her to have a series of—spells.”
“Nervous spells,” Fanny said.
“Spells?” Ava said, looking from one to the other.
“All the old families are prone to them,” Josephine said serenely.