Charlotte’s Story (8 page)

“I may start going through your mother’s things.” I didn’t mention that I had almost begun the day before, and really hadn’t known that’s what I was going to do until I said it. But as I did, I knew it was right.

Chapter 7

Olivia’s Room

Press had tried to encourage me. “Have some fun. Pretend it’s a treasure hunt.”

Nothing in my life had felt less like a treasure hunt.

Before approaching Olivia’s room (was I procrastinating?), I went to the nursery and found Michael sleeping on Eva’s trundle bed, breathing heavily. Nonie led me out of the room, whispering that she’d found him awake and with Preston in the room just before dawn, but he’d gone back to sleep.

“Press didn’t wake him,” I said automatically. “He found him trying to get out of his crib.”

Nonie didn’t respond, but went on as though I hadn’t spoken.

“We rocked in the chair for a while, and he just climbed right down and went over there.” She gestured to Eva’s bed. “The poor thing closed his eyes and went right back to sleep.”

I had to look away so Nonie wouldn’t see the tears in
my
eyes.

Grief comes to people in different ways. Even children.

Michael had few real words, yet, but nearly every day since she died he’d searched all around the nursery and wherever else he was in the house for Eva. I wondered how long it would be before he got used to her not being there. The few weeks she’d been gone were like a lifetime for a one-year-old.

“Let him sleep as long as he wants.”

Nonie gave a small sigh that told me she disagreed. She had kept both Eva and Michael on a strict schedule. But if anything justified a break in the schedule, it was Michael’s need for his sister.

I kissed her on the cheek. She was so dear to me, and she’d loved both of my children. “He might be getting sick. I’ll listen for him if you want to go down and get some breakfast.”

She looked skeptical, but it was all I had to offer her. It didn’t occur to me then to speculate about what might have awakened him. It was much later, when he was five years old, that his night terrors began. As we went out, I left the nursery door open halfway so I might hear him when he woke.

I hadn’t spent much time in Olivia’s room when she was alive, and now, when all her things belonged to me, I felt like an intruder. Beginning a few days after her death, I’d told Marlene and Terrance to keep the door to her bedroom closed. Seeing the door open had chilled me every time I came out of my own bedroom and looked across the gallery.

Olivia’s was an oddly Victorian room, cluttered and crowded compared to the rest of the house, which was full of antiques and precious things but had more of a sense of air and light to it.

Even the wallpaper was dense with cherry blossoms, and for the first time I made the connection between it and the hand-painted cherry trees on the wallpaper of the ballroom on the third floor. That motif was Oriental, with repeated images of an old man and a
beautiful Japanese girl. But like the theater, the ballroom was rarely used—not even for Olivia’s annual New Year’s Eve party. “Wasted space,” was how she had referred to it. “And the devil to heat in the winter.” (I envisioned it as something more than wasted space. I imagined transforming it into a big, friendly winter playroom where the children could run around on snowy days; but that idea, of course, had been put on hold. I hadn’t even mentioned it to Press.)

The last time I’d been in the bedroom was with Marlene, to retrieve the brooch and necklace that Olivia had left to her.

I found that I couldn’t look directly at Olivia’s massive four-poster, canopied bed—the bed she had died in—though it stayed in my field of vision wherever I went in the room. Press had asked a few weeks earlier if I wanted Olivia’s room for myself; or if not, did I think Eva would like it. It was the largest bedroom in the house, with a beautiful view of the rose garden and the hills beyond. Perhaps I was superstitious, but I told him I would never sleep in it, and that it was too big a room for a little girl. No matter how we changed it, it would always be Olivia’s room to me.

But that morning I was glad to be surrounded by Olivia’s things. I got to work—well, not really work, though I was pretending even to myself that I was there to start cleaning things out. What I wanted was to be close to Olivia, to let her know I was listening, even though the idea of actually communicating with her frightened me, and the sense of her presence I’d had on the day of the funeral had faded. If it hadn’t been for the broken glass in the dining room, I wondered if I would have continued to imagine that she might help me at all.

Because of our difference in size (and also because the idea of wearing her things seemed macabre and strange to me), I had no use for the rows of shoes and clothes in the tall French armoire and closet. Olivia’s tweed luncheon suits, day dresses, and cocktail dresses were plentiful and expensive, but not gaudy. At least ten
evening gowns had been hung in the closet, carefully shrouded in linen bags, along with a mink coat and a number of fox, ocelot, and mink pieces. There were several pairs of wool pants I’d seen her in on the coldest days if she was staying home, and a single pair of worn dungarees. Olivia administered the orchards, and knew plenty about cultivation and horticulture, but she managed to run the farm in sensible shoes and slacks or tweed skirts. Unlike Press and me, she didn’t ride. I’d always wondered about that, but she appeared not to care about horses at all.

Her bathroom was neat as a pin. For a woman in her fifties, she had remarkably few unguents and perfumes. It might have been the bathroom of a particularly tidy guest. In all the years I’d lived with Olivia, I had only been in her bathroom twice, to get aspirin. In fact, I’d never really known Olivia to have a bodily function beyond a sneeze or cough until just before she died. Press had told me he’d never once heard her break wind, or seen her rinse her mouth when she brushed her teeth. Everything was done in the privacy of her room or bathroom. Olivia once overheard him joke that moments after he’d shot out of her fully clothed body, she’d bathed, changed, and had Terrance bring her a cocktail before the doctor even arrived for his delivery. Instead of getting angry or embarrassed, Olivia had just shaken her head and told him that, no, he’d been born at eight in the morning, and she never had cocktails before five in the afternoon.

I almost tripped on a framed photograph that had fallen, face down, onto the carpet in front of the commode table that held Olivia’s two mahogany jewelry caskets.

I picked it up, but had to take it to the window to get a better look because it was so faded. It had always been on the table, but I had never looked at it closely.

A very young Olivia sat in a wicker chair in the garden, with her husband, Michael Searle Bliss, who looked even younger, standing beside her. His slender hand rested tentatively on her shoulder.
He seemed uncomfortable, perhaps too hot in his stiff collar and three-piece suit. His cheeks wore a residue of pink that was visible even in the faded colors of the photograph. (That it was in color was a kind of miracle in itself. It must have cost a small fortune to have it done.) Olivia’s simple ankle-length dress of yellow, flower-patterned silk, was fresh and contemporary for its time, though the large black bow at the waist gave it a playful look that wouldn’t at all have suited the conservative, sophisticated woman I’d known. But it worked for the girl with the attentive eyes and plain features in the photo. The camera’s distance made her scar seem insignificant.

They were an interesting couple. It was difficult to imagine Olivia being so young, and even stranger to know that her husband would be dead before they were married a year. He didn’t look old enough to be married at all, and his mild features—high cheekbones, sloping shoulders, and slight limbs—had little in common with my husband’s. Their coloring was the same, and the thickness of the eyebrows was something like Press’s, but the resemblance ended there. The family resemblance was slightly stronger when I compared Press to his father’s portrait hanging in the library.

I replaced the photograph between the jewelry boxes, which were full to overflowing. Many of her more extravagant pieces were horn or antique platinum or yellow gold. Intricate Art Nouveau pins and necklaces with flower and scroll motifs. Fanciful enamel and jeweled birds, insects, and animals that had a whimsy about them that seemed unlike Olivia.

As I suspected, there were several peacock-themed pieces, including an enameled white jeweled peacock with a clasp that, when opened, released a small and very sharp gold blade. It surprised me, but I wasn’t hurt, and I made a mental note to put it up somewhere that Michael couldn’t reach it. The largest piece was a vibrant blue male peacock with a citrine crown, his tail tapered, not fanned. His head was in profile so that only one gold-rimmed eye was visible, and that was a single dark emerald that had the
winking clarity of a diamond. The brooch was both ugly and curiously attractive at the same time. Thinking it might be a conversation piece that would look good on my fall coat, I slipped it into my pocket, feeling a bit like a thief.

Looking at the jewelry, I realized I had no idea what to do with it all. I had both my mother’s and my own simple jewelry, which, along with Olivia’s, would have eventually gone to Eva. Press had a cousin who lived in the area; yet, although he was a Bliss, he and Press weren’t close. But the cousin did have a young daughter, Jane, who should probably receive some of Olivia’s things. I closed the caskets. Where once I had marveled at their contents, now those contents weighed on me as though they were a part of some dragon’s cursed hoard. I would deal with them later.

Perhaps it was my own laziness or the fact that I was already overwhelmed, but I decided to tell Marlene that she could have whatever clothes of Olivia’s she wanted, and that she should pack the rest and have Terrance take them to the thrift store. I wondered who I would later see in Olivia’s clothes. I did set aside Olivia’s many lovely hand-tatted lace and fine linen handkerchiefs. She had collected them since she was a girl, and she was especially proud of them. They had been among the first things she’d taken time to show me after I moved into the house, and she had insisted that I borrow one of the oldest and most fragile to carry on my wedding day.

Press might have thought differently, but as far as I was concerned, everything else in the room could stay exactly as it was for all time. But I decided that the door should remain open. I didn’t want to be afraid of it anymore.

Thus emboldened, I went through the narrow door connecting the bedroom to Olivia’s morning room.

Unlike the bedroom, the morning room wasn’t crowded with bric-a-brac, but it had plenty of furniture. A pair of chairs and a low table in front of the fireplace, a large writing desk and another
chair, a couple of tables along the walls, and a chaise longue in front of the windows, with another small table and a floor lamp beside it. While there was plenty of furniture, Olivia hadn’t entertained much in this room. Only her closest friends ever saw it.

The walls were covered, from the chair railing to the ceiling, with paintings of children. Most were reproductions of quite famous works: Leighton’s strange and dignified
May Sartoris
, Bouguereau’s
Temptation
, Renoir’s
Young Girl with Parasol
, and his
Mlle Irène Cahen d’Anvers
. Mary Cassatt’s
Young Girl at a Window
was the most poignant. Despite the 19th-century dress, the girl, so serious and intent, reminded me of the Olivia in the photograph. This was how Olivia might have looked as a pensive teenage girl, unaware that she would be the sole mistress of Bliss House for nearly her entire adult life. What would her thoughts have been?

What had mine been, coming to Bliss House? I hadn’t imagined that Olivia would die before she was even sixty years old and that I would be in her morning room without her.

I avoided the neat desk with its bulging letter holder. She’d suddenly taken to her bed in the days just before she died, refusing to let anyone be with her except Terrance and Marlene. Press had told me not to worry, that she very occasionally had spells when she retired completely to her room, but that it hadn’t happened in a long time. Jack confided that he thought she’d become too dependent on the chloral hydrate drops her elderly internist had prescribed for her occasional sleeplessness and might have begun to mix them with alcohol. But no one even whispered the word “suicide.” It had been a terrible accident, Jack and the internist assured us. To spare the family any public embarrassment, her death had been recorded as simple cardiac arrest. It was, the internist said, what had certainly killed her in the end.

That it had been an accident was what I chose to believe. Olivia wasn’t a moody, unpredictable sort of person. And I could never
have faced the knowledge that both my children’s grandmothers had been selfish enough to commit suicide.

Beneath the watchful eyes of all those children, I opened the door to the room’s single enormous closet. I felt around for a light switch, but there was only a dangling beaded chain attached to an exposed bulb.