Summer in the South (21 page)

She was too drunk to do anything but lift her glass in a kind of hearty salute. Darlene smiled and melted into the crowd. Will stood staring at her with an expression she couldn’t quite decipher and then, as she began to make her way toward him, he, too, turned and walked off.

T
hey both had too much to drink and after their guests left he fell on her with a ferocity she hadn’t expected. It was so unusual for Will that at first she didn’t know how to respond. She pushed him away. The room was spinning, and she thought she might get sick.

“Forgive me,” he said. There was a hint of malice in his expression that left Ava disturbed and vaguely repulsed.

She passed out on one of the downstairs sofas while he went upstairs to sleep.

But in the morning he seemed composed and aloof. He asked her with exaggerated courtesy how she had slept, and after breakfast, as her car wouldn’t start, drove her back to Woodburn Hall.

The morning was bright and lovely but he barely said two words to her and she, after a halfhearted attempt at conversation, fell silent, too. They were both embarrassed by their conduct the night before but he was angry with her for some reason, too. That much was clear. It would never be direct confrontation and accusation with Will, she realized now, but always polite and numbing glacial coldness.

He pulled up in the drive to drop her off but kept the engine running. “Aren’t you coming in?” she said.

“No.”

That’s when she realized that Darlene had told him about her lunch with Jake Woodburn.

J
osephine was in the kitchen when she came in. She seemed surprised to see Ava. “You’re home,” she said. “Where’s Will?”

They both heard his truck in the street, roaring off like some raging mechanical beast.

“He couldn’t come in,” Ava said. She was suddenly very tired. She had a headache and her stomach hurt. “I’m not feeling well,” she said. “I think I’ll lie down.” She turned and headed for the dining room.

Behind her Josephine said, “There was a letter for you.”

It was postmarked from Michigan. Ava’s hand trembled as she took it from Josephine and slid it into her purse. She had taken Jake’s advice and written to Frank Dabrowski two weeks ago, a curt, questioning letter.

Josephine said, “Can I get you anything?” If she noticed Ava’s agitation over the letter, she gave no sign of it.

“No. Thank you. I just need to sleep.”

“Of course,” Josephine said.

Ava went into her room and shut the door. She took the letter out of her purse and stared at the handwriting. She sank down on the bed and opened the letter. It read:

I didn’t send birthday cards or Christmas presents because your mother said not to. I didn’t think that was right and I told her so. But your mother thought it was best for me to stay out of your life. I’m sorry she told you I was dead. I should have done more. Maybe if you’d been my true flesh and blood I would have fought harder. I don’t mean that like it sounds.

Sorry. Frank.

P.S. It’s ok if you write me back.

Beneath it he had scribbled a phone number, as if an afterthought.

1927

Vanderbilt
Nashville, Tennessee

She had only seen him twice before, the first time when he came up to the house to thank Papa for paying his tuition to Vanderbilt, and the second time when he brought her flowers on her sixteenth birthday. It was the summer before she went up to Vanderbilt and she thought, “What cheek, I don’t even know him.” His hair was dark, and glittered with pomade, and his fingers were thick and blunt, not the hands of a gambler, but those of a red-dirt farmer. When he left, Papa said, “Sister, I’m ashamed of you, treating a guest in our home that way.”

She had heard about him, of course. He was the talk of the whole town, riding around in his Ford jalopy, making all the girls swoon over his resemblance to Rudolph Valentino. Josephine didn’t see it. He was good-looking, of course, there was no denying that, but he knew it. Charm seemed to ooze out of every pore but it was a false charm, and she was surprised Papa had fallen for it. He was usually such a good judge of character. She supposed it had something to do with Charlie Woodburn’s striking resemblance to Old Randal Woodburn, the Patriarch. He had been downtown at his broker’s when Charlie walked by the window, and the shock of seeing that face had caused Papa’s heart to flutter. He went out into the street and called to the boy, and discovered that he was Lyman Woodburn’s son, one of Old Randal’s Black Woodburn progeny. He had been taken to New Orleans by his mother as a boy and raised there, and had only just recently returned to his “Pater’s stomping grounds,” as he put it. All this Papa told them one evening at supper while Josephine sat curling her top lip and Celia played with her food and Fanny secretly fed Tom Penny tidbits from her plate. It was the fourth or fifth Tom Penny they’d raised; Fanny seemed to lack imagination when it came to naming cats.

“I hear he’s a gambler and a drunkard,” Josephine said. She flushed under her father’s steady gaze.

“There’s some that have not had your privileges, Sister.”

There was something personal in his defense of Charlie Woodburn, Josephine realized later. Papa was, after all, the last of the legitimate male Woodburns; all the male cousins had different surnames now, and although that might not have mattered to some, it obviously mattered to Papa. It was a year of great floods and cataclysmic events, so Josephine should have been prepared for a world turned suddenly upside down. Still, she was surprised to learn later that he had taken Charlie under his wing, had seen to it that the boy was introduced around town, made sure he had decent and respectable lodgings. And he had taken a fatherly interest in the boy’s education, too, writing a letter to Chancellor Kirkland at Vanderbilt offering to pay Charlie’s tuition.

When Charlie came to the house to thank Papa, his manners were oily and obsequious, and Josephine was surprised Papa didn’t see this. Charlie had the hungry, ambitious look of a man who aims to climb high, and when he glanced at Josephine, she let her eyes rest on him a little longer, as if to say, “I see you for who you are even if they don’t,” and she was rewarded by a faint creep of color along his brow.

When he brought her flowers on her sixteenth birthday, she took them with an abrupt “Thank you,” and spent the entire evening not giving him so much as a glance, yawning and excusing herself halfway through the story of his childhood in New Orleans.

Later, she heard the heavy tread of Papa’s footsteps on the stairs, and when he left after scolding her, she lay in the big mahogany bed watching the moon climb the June sky, determined that should she run into Charlie Woodburn at Vanderbilt, she would cut him dead.

Josephine was attractive, although overly tall, and as a good many of the freshman class at Vanderbilt had been her classmates at Mr. Webb’s school, she was never at a loss for partners at dances and cotillions. She was known to have a rather dry, sarcastic wit, and was the antithesis of the wild “flapper” but nevertheless was considered a “jolly girl” and a “good sport.” She bobbed her hair and smoked Coronas and, as it was still Prohibition, carried around the requisite “Teddy Bear” with its hollow metal stomach filled with gin.

Vanderbilt, in those days, boasted a social calendar nearly as strenuous as its academic calendar. Josephine was a good student and she took her studies seriously but she also enjoyed the club sporting events and the dances and the house parties. Booze was illegal, but they had no trouble getting it, frequenting a Smoky Row bootlegger who went by the incongruous name of Tiny Hammer.

In March of her freshman year, she was one of a select group invited to take the annual pilgrimage to Mammoth Cave, Kentucky. They would take the train from Nashville to Glasgow, Kentucky, and then the Mammoth Cave Special to the Cave Inn, where they had rented several suites. The following day they’d spend touring the cave with its many resplendent rooms and its memorial to Vanderbilt before spending the evening dancing at the Mammoth Cave Ball in the hotel’s mezzanine ballroom. Josephine had been hearing about the annual pilgrimage ever since she first beg an at the Webb School, and she had looked forward to this event almost as much as she’d looked forward to Vanderbilt itself.

She’d only run into Charlie Woodburn a few times; he’d obviously been keeping a low profile, which was a good thing, as no one liked a threadbare social climber, even one with the illustrious name of Woodburn. On the bright morning she left for Mammoth Cave, she had just climbed aboard the train and settled herself in her seat when she heard the opening blasts of a jazz tune and, turning, she saw Charlie Woodburn a few rows back with a clarinet to his lips. He was sitting in the back surrounded by Ben Clement, Miles Crockett, and Jeff Bemis, who were all clapping and thumping him on the shoulders and it occurred to Josephine that Charlie was more intelligent than she’d given him credit for being. He hadn’t been lying low at all; he’d been slowly, gradually insinuating himself into her social set. He played “Birmingham Bertha” and “Blues My Naughty Sweetie Gives to Me” and “Let’s Sow a Wild Oat” until the conductor came back and told him to stop.

Later, on his way to the dining car, he winked at Josephine and said, “Hi, Toots,” and this time it was Josephine who felt her face flush.

Lenora Donelson leaned over and said breathlessly, “Isn’t that your cousin?”

Josephine opened her compact and began to powder her nose. “Not really,” she said.

After that, Josephine couldn’t go anywhere without running into Charlie Woodburn. He was good friends with all the boys she’d attended the Webb School with, and as he was a polished gambler who knew how to cheat in order to let his opponents win, he was considered a “sport.” The girls were all wild for him, for his dark good looks and easy charm. He was also an accomplished jazz musician and knew all the jazz lingo from having grown up on the streets of New Orleans, and his vocabulary and manner of speech were much admired and copied. In this he was lucky; if he’d grown up in Woodburn, a boy from his background would have talked with the nasal speech so derided by members of her own class, what the editors of the school newspaper,
The Hustler
, called “that naso-nasal twang.” But with his carefully modulated, slightly Creole accent he sounded a little like Madame Arcenaux, Josephine’s long-vanquished nemesis.

Madame Arcenaux had been relatively easy to get rid of but Josephine had the feeling Charlie Woodburn would not be quite so manageable.

The summer after her freshman year she went to Italy with her cousins Minnie and Lamar. It was all she could do; she couldn’t stay home. Papa had secured a clerking job for Charlie Woodburn in his factory’s office, and he took his noonday meal with the family now, walking from downtown in the dusty heat and returning to his office after siesta. In those days the downtown shops and offices closed for dinner and for an hour afterward, when everyone went home to nap during the stifling heat of midday.

Josephine and the cousins rented a villa in Florence near the Palazzo Pitti and later spent two weeks in Venice, but despite the Ponte dei Sospiri and the Basilica di San Marco, Venice made Josephine feel agitated and restless. The gondoliers along the canals, with their dark good looks and bold, roving hands, reminded her too much of Charlie Woodburn.

Fanny and Celia’s letters from home were filled with Charlie. He called them “Little Cuz” and “Sprite,” and he made them all laugh, even Papa, with his jokes and tales of Uncle Remus and Bourbon Street. He built Celia a dollhouse out of oak, and when Fanny’s old cat disappeared he brought her a dear little gray kitten that she named Tom Penny VI. Papa took Charlie to meetings of his gentleman’s club, the Belle Meade Club.

All in all it seemed that the entire family was enamored of Charlie Woodburn; everyone, it would seem, but Josephine.

They sailed from Europe too late to attend the opening of Vanderbilt, and by the time Josephine arrived on campus, classes had been in session for nearly two weeks. She had determined during the long transatlantic trip that her relationship with Charlie Woodburn would, in the future, be cordial but cool. She would no longer allow herself to slip into a pattern of open hostility on her part and amused acceptance on his. It had occurred to her that Charlie was a gamesman, and that her open dislike of him, rather than cooling his vanity, simply stoked it. She wished now that she had not fled to Europe. Her sisters’ tales of the long summer spent in Charlie’s company left Josephine feeling oddly bereft, as if she’d missed something that could never be recaptured. Papa spoke of Charlie’s manly grace, of his natural ability as a marksman. Only the child Clara seemed to have escaped enchantment, becoming oddly agitated at the mention of Charlie’s name and wrapping her hands tightly in her mother’s apron.

Charlie had pledged Delta Tau Delta, one of the best fraternities on campus, which should have surprised Josephine, but did not. It was an old house whose members were mostly legacies, and she suspected Papa had had a hand in Charlie being rushed. The winter formal was being held in New Orleans, and in November Carlisle Ransom asked Josephine to accompany him as his date. They were to take the train to New Orleans Friday morning, spend Friday night at the Ponchartrain Hotel, and Saturday night dancing at the Creole Ballroom, before returning to Nashville on Sunday. They would take individual cars to the Nashville train station, caravanning, and because Carlisle was a good friend of Charlie Woodburn’s, it was determined that Carlisle and Josephine would ride up with Charlie and his date, Marian Cason. The arrangements were made, there was nothing Josephine could do to contest them, but halfway to the station, Charlie swung his head over his shoulder and looked at her and she knew suddenly, as clearly as if he’d spoken the words, that he had arranged for Carlisle to take her, that she was here at Charlie’s bidding. This knowledge left her irritated and yet vaguely, faintly thrilled.

By the time they reached New Orleans, however, she’d begun to think she had imagined it all, because not once on the rest of the ride to the station, not once on the long train trip to New Orleans, had Charlie shown her the least bit of attention. She was in a foul mood by the time she dressed for dinner, and was a miserable date for Carlisle, pleading a headache after dinner at Galatoire’s and making an early evening of it. On Saturday she determined to do better, dressing herself carefully before the ball in a blue silk gown that echoed the startling gray-blue of her eyes, and carefully painting her mouth a brilliant shade of scarlet.

She was surprised to find Charlie waiting for her at the foot of the stairs. “Your date is hailing a cab,” he said to her. His evening clothes were badly tailored, and that gave her a surge of confidence. “Oh?” she said, pulling on her gloves.

“Marian is helping him. I’m here to escort you.”

“Are you?” she said smoothly, still fiddling with her gloves, and without a glance in his direction she went out the doors ahead of him.

He did not ask her to dance. It didn’t matter—her card was full—but from time to time she sought him out in the crowded ballroom. He danced recklessly, carelessly, his dark hair combed smoothly off his brow, the color rising in his face. Whatever poor impression his badly fitting clothes made was offset by his graceful manner; yet there was something of the dance hall in his movements, too, a style that seemed at times coached and uninspired. His face, when he thought no one was watching, would relax into lines of disappointment and boredom, before changing, just as quickly, into an expression of good cheer and camaraderie when someone came up to clap him on the shoulder.

Josephine’s cousin, Minnie, was there from Sewanee. “Ooh la la,” she said, gazing at Charlie across the crowded ballroom, “is that The Cousin?” She was very drunk, and later, when they went to a little speakeasy on Frenchmen Street, sat on Charlie’s lap and ran her fingers through his hair so that his date, Marian, got up in disgust and wandered over to the piano player. They were drinking bathtub gin, and Josephine’s head banged like a bass drum. The air in the smoky, crowded room became too thick to breathe. She stood up and stumbled out into the cobblestone street. She had lost Carlisle, and apparently one of her shoes, too, several juke joints back. She stood for a moment staring at the garish lights blinking along Frenchmen Street, trying to get her bearings. She could see the spires of St. Louis Cathedral rising over the tree line. Behind her the door to the speakeasy banged open and a rush of stale, smoky air swept over her.