Burnt Mountain (19 page)

“Where is she?” I cried. “Where is Grand?”

My mother came and put her arms around me again. Aengus stood behind her. He had tear tracks on his dark face.

“Darling, she’s at Magnusen’s. She… wanted cremation. I’m sure you knew that. We’ll keep her urn in the beautiful little room
they have for that at St. Philip’s. She most emphatically did not want a funeral, so I thought we’d just
have some of her close Atlanta friends tonight. I’m glad so many of them could come; it was such short notice—”

“I’m sure Grand wouldn’t have wanted to inconvenience you,” I said. “Maybe she’ll apologize. Puff ashes all over you.”

“Thayer—”

“I’ll stay with her for a little while, Mrs. Wentworth,” Aengus said, moving in to slide me from my mother’s arms. “It was
an awful shock for her, especially today—”

“Oh, that’s right,” Mother said. “It’s your honeymoon, isn’t it? And you were at Grand’s house. That’s really too bad, but
Thayer must come down and speak to her grandmother’s friends. Lily is already there. Everyone will wonder—”

“I don’t give a happy rat’s ass what they wonder!” I shouted. “I’m not going down there and moo around about what a wonderful
woman she was, and how much I’ll miss her. If they don’t know that by now they don’t need me to tell them—”

“Thayer!”

“Please, Mrs. Wentworth. Mom,” Aengus said. “Just give us a few minutes. We’ll be down soon.”

“Fine,” Mother said in her clipped angry-in-public voice. “If Thayer can manage it, of course.”

She left, closing the door with a little bang, and Aengus put his chin on my head and said, “What a bi—witch she can be,”
into my hair. “You think you can go down?”

I shook my head no into his shoulder.

“I’m going to stay here,” I said. “I’m going to sleep here. I hope you’ll stay with me, but if you don’t want to—”

“Don’t be an ass, baby,” he said. “Wherever you are, I am.
You need to eat something, though. I’ll go get you a plate and say a few words around for both of us. I won’t be long.”

I don’t think he was, but by the time he returned with one of Grand’s Haviland plates full of party sandwiches and cheese
straws I was sunk into Grand’s bed, fast asleep in a cloud of Vetiver. He slid into bed beside me and I turned into his arms,
but I did not wake. We both slept, that night, with Grand’s arms around us.

My mother sent Juanita to wake us early.

“Miss Crystal got some stuff she want to go over with you,” she said. “She and your sister and Goose are on the porch. There’s
coffee out there.”

Alternately yawning and sniffling, I went down the stairs and out to the screened porch. Aengus stayed behind to shave, said
Goose would probably kill him with a hoe handle if he saw the state of his stubble. By the time he joined us, his cheeks fresh
shining, we were finishing our second cups of coffee. For the last few moments no one had spoken.

When Aengus had settled beside me into the long porch sofa, my mother said, “Well. This won’t take long. I know you two want
to get back to your honeymoon, and it’s all so simple I believe we can just talk it out. Your grandmother”—and she looked
around at Lily and me—”has some specific bequests to you that I thought I would tell you about. You can verify them against
her will, of course, but I don’t think there’ll be a reading until a bit later.”

She waited, looking at us, and we both nodded. I did not want anything from Grand. I only wanted Grand. But apparently this
doling out was going to happen anyway.

“Lily, Grand left you and Goose”—did anyone else notice the slight flaring of my mother’s nostrils at the name?—”a trust fund
for each child you might have and five hundred thousand dollars.”

Lily gasped with what looked to be surprised pleasure; Goose looked taciturnly displeased, but since his brows met over his
nose anyway it was hard to tell.

“The rest of her estate, except for bequests to her charities, comes to me. You girls will inherit it one day, of course.
She has left Detritus the Mercedes and a good sum. He will continue to drive for me.” (This never happened; Detritus and the
Mercedes took off the next day and did not return to Lytton. I learned much later that he had a car service with a nice small
fleet and was prospering like the green bay tree.)

My mother swept her eyes toward me.

“Thayer, your grandmother has left you a house.”

She did not go on, and finally I said, “What house? I didn’t know Grand had another house.”

“Neither did anyone else, apparently,” my mother said repressively. “But she did, and it is now yours. And Aengus’s, of course.”

He nodded affably at her.

I did not say anything else and she went on.

“It is a stone house on Bell’s Ferry Road, out near the Chattahoochee. It has three bedrooms and three baths, and is furnished
with pieces from your grandmother’s Buckhead house. It is quite a nice house. The neighborhood is considered very good. All
the houses were vacation homes once, I believe, because of the nearness to the river. She has apparently had it
cleaned once a month since she moved to Lytton, and all you would need to do is move in. If you should want the house, of
course. I know your plans were to remain in Sewanee. In that case I would be delighted to take it off your hands for a very
generous sum. There is a letter she left for you, too.”

She fell silent. I could think of nothing to say. Aengus said, “Did she tell you about the house, Mrs. Wentworth? You seem
to know a lot about it.”

“No,” she said levelly, studying, not him or me, but the sweating iced-tea pitcher. “I went up yesterday afternoon and looked
at it.”

He and I were both silent, simply looking at her.

“I wanted to make sure that your inheritance was commensurate with the others, of course, Thayer,” she said. “I was prepared
to augment it a bit if it wasn’t. A house, you know, is not quite the same thing as… financial inheritance.”

“And was it?” Aengus asked interestedly. “Commensurate?”

“I believe so. It isn’t exactly grand, but it’s really quite lovely… for what it is, of course.”

“Of course,” he said. And suddenly it occurred to me that Grand’s mystery house must be a really wonderful house in a faultless
location, for it was obvious that my mother was furious to the core of her being that the house had come to me and not to
her. A house in northside Atlanta… wasn’t it what she had yearned for since the beginning of her marriage?

“You said there was a letter….”

She picked the envelope up from the coffee table and handed it to me. She did not move from her chair. No one else stirred,
either. Obviously, I was meant to share the letter.

I got up.

“I think I’ll read it on the way,” I said to Aengus, and he got up and followed me off the porch.

“On the way where?” my mother called back after me. Her voice was edged like broken glass.

“To see my new house!” I called back.

No one spoke until after we had gotten into Aengus’s car and turned out of the driveway toward Atlanta. If they had I would
have heard them.

On the outskirts of Atlanta I finally opened Grand’s letter. At the sight of her graceful Palmer handwriting I felt my throat
and eyes flood again with tears, but I was determined not to smudge Grand’s words, so I shook my head hard and read aloud
to Aengus:

I rode the rest of the way into the city, to where we turned off in the middle of Buckhead on Bell’s Ferry Road, with my face
buried in my hands. I did not cry. I merely let my internal movie of Grand run: the times when I was very small and she would
take my hand and let me toddle down to the water behind our house and sometimes splash with me in the shallows; curling into
her warm lap on a cooling summer night on the porch glider, listening sleepily to her and my grandfather Big Finch talking
with my parents and breathing deeply of her perfume; showing her my first long dress and hearing her delighted words that
made me feel I was truly beautiful, at least on that night; her arms hard around me after the searing pain of the baby and
defection of Nick; her words on meeting Aengus: “Don’t let him go too far into the Irish thing. Don’t let him take you there
with him.”

I lifted my head and looked at him. I still did not know what she meant.

“Almost there.” Aengus smiled at me. “Almost home.”

“How do you know it will be?”

“I don’t know. I just do.”

I had been down Bell’s Ferry Road before, I think, but
I did not remember much about it except for the great river forest that was cloven in two by the Chattahoochee River. I remembered
no houses. But now here they were, tucked back into glades hewn out of towering hardwoods and pine. Most were older, with
mature shrubbery and gardens. Sunlight slanted in through the treetops, picking out a gabled roof here, a summerhouse there.
There was considerable traffic, but this end of Bell’s Ferry seemed to generate a green silence. When we slowed at a mailbox
to read the numbers, I could hear the deep laughter of the river.

“Here we are,” Aengus said, turning into a driveway. “Holy Saints!”

He stopped and I looked up at the house and began to cry.

“Oh, Aengus,” I sobbed. “Oh, Aengus!”

It was not that my grandmother’s house was grand or even elegant; it was just that there was not an inch of it that did not
look like something out of a child’s fairy tale… Hans Christian Andersen, not Grimm’s. It rose out of the center of a circular
glade, sunlight falling on it as if trained like a spotlight. The grass in the glade was almost pure emerald, and the trees
around and above it were lacy with new green, leaning close as lovers. The house itself was three stories of river stone,
with bayed casement windows on each floor and a wide carved door set into a portico. The roof was old slates, warm grand fawn
and green where moss clung to them. All the trim and the shutters and doors were painted French blue.

“It’s a Normandy house,” I said when I could get my breath. “Normandy in a forest on the river. It’s pure magic!”

“So does it look like home?” Aengus laughed. I could see
the house reflected in his blue eyes. On that day, Aengus’s eyes were full of home.

I ran up the flagstone walkway and put the old key into the bronze lock and the big blue door swung open. Even before it closed
behind us, I believed in my heart that I was then and forever home.

F
rom the Bell’s Ferry house we went, not back to Lytton, but on to the Mountain and the Domain. There seemed to me nothing
to go back to Lytton to. Lily and Goose had not yet gone back to their home in a small town south of Lytton but would soon.
It was a dreary little house with no trees around it, in a sun-smitten suburb called Summer Garden. There was not a flower
in it, nor a garden.

“A nice little starter house,” my mother said of it. I feared secretly that Lily would both start and finish there. Goose
had worked up to manager of the local supermarket; his one marketable skill had been football, for which there was little
call in the small-town South after high school.