The Legacy of Eden

That was what happened. But, of course, that wasn’t what people would say.

She waited. She made her husband breakfast in the morning, she did her chores, she made her lists and she served them both dinner in the evening. The sun rose and fell on her patience and she bided her time listening and hoping that what she had done had been enough.

Here is a question I am forced to ask: did she really love my grandfather back then? Certainly, she did later, even to the rest of us it was evident. But at the time all those years ago, did she? Or was it simply an escape, just as Lou had been when she was a girl of nineteen—the next rung on the ladder? Or was it that my grandfather had seen in her all the things she had been waiting for someone to find, and in him she saw the potential to realize those dreams into a reality? Is that what you would call love?

Why, you may wonder, do I not ask the same thing of my grandfather?

Because there is a much simpler way of clearing that up.

Two weeks passed and in that time this was what Anne-Marie learned.

She learned that Leo had not been back to the farm since the day of the funeral.

She learned that Cal had not refused his share and that he had continued to stay in the main house with his sister and daughter. When the suppliers had rung up, it had been he who fielded their calls, and when the farmhands came down in the evenings, they said it was he who gave them their instructions during the day. Leo stayed in a hotel on the outskirts of town and Cal began to farm Aurelia.

Piper tried to see Leo. She was admitted into his room at the hotel. She started to tell him Cal’s side of the story. She pleaded with him to see sense and come home. They could still farm the place together, each taking a share, she insisted. It would be a family business just like their father had wanted.

But when she next tried to call on him a week later, the man at the front desk told her he would not receive her and when she telephoned, she was told that Leo had asked not to be disturbed. She resorted to writing a letter, which she took to the post office and gave to Florence Baxter, who noted the name and address with an uncomfortable grimace. No one saw Cal outside of the farm.

And then one evening Anne-Marie and her husband sat down to dinner. The meat was overcooked and the vegetables wilted on their forks but they ate it nonetheless. When the doorbell rang, Lou pushed his plate forward and wiped his mouth on the napkin before going to see who it was.

She heard him before she saw him.

When he came into the room she saw immediately that he was different. Instead of the cheap salesman suits he usually wore, he was in slacks and a blue plaid shirt. His hair was lightened by the sun and she could see the faint discoloring line on his forearms that spending time out working in the fields had given him.

“So what can we do for you, Cal, that’s so urgent I can’t finish my supper?” asked Lou as he sat back down at the table to do precisely that.

Cal didn’t look at Anne-Marie as he spoke.

“I’ve come to talk to you, sir, about a matter that has been plaguing my conscience for some time now.”

“Why would you come to me about it? I’m a doctor, not a priest,” Lou joked.

Anne-Marie saw the ignorance of her husband draw a blank across his features as he stirred his food with his fork and she allowed herself a brief moment of irritation.

“There’s no real easy way of saying this so I guess I should just say it,” said Cal. Lou did not look up from his plate.

“I believe I’m in love with your wife, sir,” Cal finished.

Anne-Marie watched as her husband’s fork paused underneath a heap of sweet corn. His jaw worked slowly as his mouth caught up with his ears.

“Did you hear me, sir?”

“Yes, I heard you.” Lou put down his fork and, composing his hands in his lap, stared at Cal.

“What do you expect me to do about it?”

Cal flicked a gaze at Anne-Marie but she gave away nothing. This had to be his fight, she decided, though she would never forgive him if he lost.

“I don’t know what you mean, sir.”

“Well, Cal, you come into my house, interrupt my dinner and tell me that you’re in love with my wife. I assume you’ve done all this for a reason.”

“Yes, sir. I have. I’ve come to take her home with me, if you’ve no objection.”

Lou stared at him, incredulous. Suddenly he laughed.

“Cal, even if I wanted to, I couldn’t hit you. The way you talk I don’t think I could live with myself as a doctor if I hit a simpleton.”

“I’ve been sleeping with her,” said Cal, “in the full sense of the word. It’s been going on for some time now. I have known her and been with her knowing that she was your wife. But that’s only in name, and now it’s time for her to come home with me, sir. Seeing as how she hasn’t been yours for a long time now, I cannot see how you can object to her returning to her rightful place.”

For the first and last time in her life Anne-Marie would see a raft of emotions find life in the eyes of Lou Parks. The man who had been little more than a ghost since she’d come to live with him as his wife remembered his blood and let it course in shades of puce and purple throughout his skin. He was so still she wondered if when he finally broke his pause it would be to fly at Cal and try to kill him. She could see Cal bracing himself as he contemplated the same thing and all the while she kept herself still, wringing her napkin between her fingers under the table.

Finally Lou turned to his wife and asked, “Is this true?”

Anne-Marie nodded.

“And do you want to go with him?”

Anne-Marie paused and then nodded again.

“Well …” said Lou and he stood up from the table, went into the living room and shut the door.

Cal stared at where he had gone and then said quickly, “Get your things.”

She was finished in twenty minutes. She had made a mental inventory weeks ago and made sure everything that was needed would be ready. She came down the stairs carrying her overcoat and a single suitcase.

“Do you want to speak to him?” asked Cal.

Anne-Marie gave him her suitcase. “I’ll see you in the car,” she said firmly.

Cal hesitated, but she had already opened the door to the living room.

In the car he waited for ten minutes drumming his fingers against the wheel. Eventually the front door of the house opened and in a moment she climbed in beside him.

Without saying a word they drove home and that was when my grandmother finally stopped being Anne-Marie Parks, the local doctor’s wife, and came to be known as Lavinia Hathaway: adulterer, whore, monster … victor.

That is where my grandfather used to finish this story. That was where everyone finished the story, but that was not the end.

As they stopped at some traffic lights, my grandmother said very quietly but clearly, “If you ever hit me again, I’ll stab you while you sleep.”

My grandfather nodded in answer and when the lights went green, drove on.

5

TODAY I PULLED OUT THE SUITCASE FROM THE top of my wardrobe and lay it open on the bed. Then I made myself a drink.

I packed some clothes, my diary and a list of phone numbers, and went about the business of trying to organize my life for the next few weeks. I made a checklist of things to do: people to call to let them know I was going away; to change my voice mail; to go through the fridge and throw out all perishables that would otherwise greet me with a noxious aroma on my return. I got to the end of the page and tapped my pen against the pad for a few minutes and waited.

I don’t know what I was waiting for, but after a while I realized that my refusal to stand up and start getting on with things was less a willful act than an inability. Try as I might, I couldn’t move. I sat there feeling the weight of my legs anchor me to the floor. Time passed and I knew I had things to do. I saw the list on the notepad staring at me with reproach, but my body refused to cooperate. For the first time in my life my head was saying yes, but the rest of me was saying no, and there was nothing that I could do about it.

And suddenly I was reminded of my mother. She went through an exacerbated version of this when my father died. She didn’t emerge from her room for a month. After the funeral, she washed and cleaned the house, set out the breakfast things for the following morning, then went upstairs to her room and undressed before she climbed into her bed and then didn’t get out of it again.

Piper came to attend to her with my uncle’s wife, Georgia-May, but it was my grandmother who saw to me and my sisters. She moved us into the main house. There was no discussion, no preamble, she simply showed up at our home the day after the funeral and waited in the kitchen as we each packed a bag and then followed her up the long drive. She cooked breakfast, got us ready for school, watched over us as we did our chores and homework: she was faultless. During that month she took sole responsibility for our welfare. My grandfather helped, of course, but my father’s death hit him hard. I think it if weren’t for the fact that my mother had gotten there first, he would have taken to his bed just as she did.

The only thing that we really hated during that time was that we were not permitted to see Mom. That was Lavinia’s wish. She batted aside our questions with such ferocity that in the end we stopped asking. Once Claudia snuck away, when Lavinia was busy with our grandfather, who had drunk all the whiskey in the house and then tried to drive into town for some more. Claudia walked down to our home in the middle of the afternoon, but whatever it was that she saw or heard there, it caused her to lock herself up in her room when she came back and no matter how much Ava and I pushed and pressed her, she refused to tell us anything about it. In the end, because I wouldn’t leave her alone, she slapped me across the mouth and pushed me out the door. After that, at Ava’s request, I stopped asking her. We’ve never spoken to her about it since.

That was such a strange time, living with my grandparents. That was the first time I really began to see what being a Hathaway meant. Instead of sitting down for meals in our scrubbed kitchen, dinner was a stiff-backed affair every evening at the long polished oak table with triangles of white cloth and china plates with patterns of blue swallows around the rim. Instead of the eight rooms I was accustomed to in my house, I now had twenty-two. The finest linens were on our beds, fresh flowers were in every vase (of which there were plenty) and various newspaper clippings, framed and placed on the walls, were interspersed with the customary family portraits.

Piper caught me staring at them once. She smiled and smoothed her hand down my braid. “Hard to believe sometimes,” she said. “Things used to be so different when I was your age.”

I was not the only one awakened to my social status by our time there. Claudia came to learn of our position in quite a different manner. Our grandmother’s way of trying to help us in our grief was to talk about my father, not how my mother would come to talk of him, as a man, but as part of a legacy: a legacy cut short that we must now take up.

“Make him proud,” she’d say. And Claudia would look up at her so eagerly, her brow became knotted with confusion.

“How, Grandma?”

“Remember who you are. Remember what your last name is.” She leaned back and smiled. As if that were the key to everything. As if we had been born to a world of unlocked doors where everything that lay behind them was there for the taking. Claudia would come to think so and look what happened to her. But if we had been smart enough, we would have remembered our mother in her bed, utterly devastated by the loss of her husband, and known that our name was just a name: it gave us no magical protection; it had no divine right.

As I sit here in my chair, I wonder if this was how my mother must have felt immediately after my father’s death. I can understand now, how during that time her body was acknowledging a fact her mind hadn’t been able to process, which I believe was this: that she was afraid, more afraid than she had ever been in her life, of what was before her, of what she had to do and even more so that she had to do it alone. I know this because that is exactly what I am feeling now.

“We are all alone,” my grandmother had told me once. “No one feels our aches with us, or our pains or our joys. We are like islands floating in a sea together but that’s all, we are still just islands, so close we can touch each other, smell each other, but always from a distance.”

It is strange that it is her voice I remember now, not my mother’s comforting arms when we finally came home, or how she held us and buried her face in our hair and told us she would never leave us again. No, it is not this I think about; it is my grandmother’s words instead. I hear them strung out through the notes of her voice as I sit at my desk. They go around and around my mind in a continuous loop while the light outside seeps from pearl to gray.

A few weeks after her Decree Absolute came through, my grandparents stood in the courthouse and were married. There is only one remaining photograph of that day. It would come to sit in a frame of dark wood on a small chest of drawers in the entrance hallway. My grandfather stands there stiffly, his arm wound about my grandmother’s waist. He is squinting at the camera, though it is difficult to tell because the picture is so grainy. My grandmother is not looking at the camera: she is turned away, her face buried into her new husband’s chest. To the casual observer she looks adoring, overwhelmed with love. In truth she was fighting a bout of nausea that had been plaguing her for days. It didn’t take her long to figure out what had brought it on.

To say that my grandparents’ marriage was a scandal would be something of an understatement, although the way it was expressed by the townsfolk was rather understated. Iowans by nature are polite at all costs and even though they may long to tell you what they actually think of you, something—be it the morals of church or their love of community—holds them in check. So to that end, despite the contempt they felt for her, people still nodded at my grandmother when they passed her in the street though their lips were pursed and they slid their eyes from hers. People still responded to her questions and doomed attempts at polite conversation, though as minimally as they could legitimately get away with. She always knew that once she passed them they would stare at each other and in low voices berate her and everything about her, starting from the day she showed up at her uncle’s house in a pinafore dress accompanied by a feckless mother.

But for the first time in her life she didn’t care. She didn’t care when they noticed her stomach grow and their eyebrows lifted into crescents of surprise and then lowered in disapproval. She didn’t care when her family refused to speak to or acknowledge her (the only people in the town who did so). She didn’t even care when people pointedly mentioned Lou within earshot. None of it mattered; none of it could touch her, because for the first time in her life she was happy. Truly, unadulteratedly happy. She sang to her belly, she did her chores, and while her husband worked in the fields, she imagined the Aurelia I would come to know and live on, the farm we would love and live for; the home we would die and sin for.

Meanwhile Piper despaired.

Her brother’s affair with the doctor’s wife and their marriage had upset her greatly. As long as she would live, she would remember the night Lavinia came to the farm with Cal. Piper had sat at the kitchen table in her dressing gown, waiting anxiously for her brother to return. He had been gone for hours with no indication of where he was or when he would be back and with everything that had gone on in the past few weeks, the uncertainty made her nervous. So she waited up for him after she had put Julia to bed, watching the sunlight outside eventually grow dim and vanish. When she finally heard her brother’s footstep in the hall at around ten o’clock, she leapt up and ran out to see him, but when she saw the doctor’s wife standing behind him holding her suitcase, she took one look at the both of them and slapped her brother so hard across the face, the sound made my grandmother jump against a small rosewood table by the door and topple the flowers in their vase, so that the water spilled across the surface and dripped down onto the floor.

“For God’s sake, Cal,” Piper spat, “hasn’t this family enough to contend with?”

Cal rubbed his face gently, massaging the blood back into his cheek.

“It’s done, Piper.”

Piper looked at my grandmother, who peered at her uncertainly from behind Cal, and curled her lip in distaste.

“Anne-Marie Parks?” she asked, her eyes narrowed to slits. She assessed my grandmother in one long, contemptuous look.

“It’s Lavinia,” my grandmother corrected.

“What?”

“She’s coming to live here, Piper—she’s going to be my wife.” Cal looked down at his sister, who was staring at him in shocked horror.

“Her? She’s married, to a doctor, to our town’s doctor. For the love of God, do you know what people will say?” Piper screeched.

“Hush,” said Cal, looking up at the stairs, “you’ll wake the girl.”

“You need someone who can be a good, faithful wife,” she spat at my grandmother. “Someone who knows a thing or two about farming, someone who will be up with you from sunup to sundown. Not some prissy town maid whose only function is shopping and ordering linen from a catalogue.”

Cal took a step toward his sister.

“You just watch what you—” But then he stopped, because my grandmother had already moved away from him. She came to stand before Piper, her eyes burning a hole in Piper’s face so that my great-aunt leaned her head back and blinked. Then my grandmother stalked past her and went into the kitchen. She began to search through the drawers, opening and closing them, while Cal and Piper stood in the doorway, openmouthed.

When she took out the long kitchen knife and held it up so the light shone on the blade, Cal put his hands up and took a step back, but she was already coming toward them. They sprang away from her as she walked past and opened the door. She went out and stood on the porch and, holding the blade to the soft flesh of her inner arm, she drew the knife across it, so that her blood began to pour from the wound and splatter on the ground.

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