My Sweet Audrina

  “Oh, boy, teaching a child math through the market. Like that makes you a broker.”

  “I didn’t say he made me a broker. He did take me to the brokerage and even announced that I would be his partner someday when he had his own company.”

  “He just wished he had a son to inherit everything. Every man wants that. I became his son. He said that to me after he married my mother. Or, at least, I thought I had become his son. What father would do this to his son?” he asked, waving the papers in our faces.

  “Stop it. Stop saying those things. I don’t like talking about going against his orders while his body is waiting for burial.”

  “Against his orders? Don’t make me laugh. You think you could choose stocks for our clients the way you thought you could pick winners when you were a child? Tying your birthstone ring to a string and dangling it over a list of stocks in the paper until it pointed to the right one?”

  “I did that, and Papa made money on the stock. You yourself were not so very good at it in the beginning. Did you forget?”

  “Please!” he cried. “I was learning, whereas all you Whitefern women were crazy with your beliefs in magic . . . hoodoo, voodoo . . . paying that psychic to predict whether your mother would have a boy or a girl.”

  “I’m sorry I told you that story.”

  “I bet. Well, hear this, Audrina. There’s no magic in our business. It takes knowledge and experience. You don’t really have either when it comes to the stock market, especially today. It’s too sophisticated. You’d do no better than . . . than her!” he screamed, pointing at Sylvia.

  Sylvia began to cry.

  “Don’t point at her like that. She doesn’t understand!” I shouted back at him. That only upset her more. Anyone arguing in the house put her in a panic.

  “You don’t understand, either,” he snapped back. “You don’t understand how I feel being made a fool of like this. You can feel sorry for . . . for that,” he said, pointing at Sylvia again, “but not for your husband!”

  Sylvia’s sobbing increased, and her body shook.

  “Look what you’ve done!” I cried. “I’ve been keeping her calm. It hasn’t been easy.”

  I put my arm around my sister and began to comfort her again. Since Papa’s death, she would break out into crying jags and then howl with pain whenever there was a mention of Papa’s passing. Every condolence phone call was like an electric shock. She would barely eat and wandered from room to room, expecting to find him. Every night, she called to him in her sleep, and every night, I ended up sleeping in her bed with her, her head on my breast, her tears dampening my nightgown.

  “You know what? This is insane. I can’t believe I’m even discussing it,” Arden said, and he marched angrily out of the living room, his arms stiffly extended at his sides, his hands clenched in fists.

  We hardly said another word to each other until the funeral. I had my hands full caring for Sylvia anyway. I was terrified of how she would behave at the service, but fortunately, she was in more of a state of disbelief than one of mourning. She even looked surprised that we were there in the church listening to the sermon and the eulogy. Every once in a while, she would gaze around the church, searching for Papa, especially whenever his name was uttered.

  There were many businessmen in the Tidewater area who knew and liked my father very much. And of course, there were many community leaders who also knew him, so we anticipated a big attendance. But when we arrived at the site and I looked around, it seemed that few people had bothered to come.

  “Where is everyone? How can they not pay Papa the respect he deserves?” I asked Arden, when I saw that no one else was coming and the service was about to begin.

  He turned his amber-colored eyes on me. They were sparkling but not with tears the way I was sure mine were. His looked more excited than sad. “Many of his friends and older clients have died. Besides, people always think, ‘The king is dead. Long live the king.’ ”

  “What does that mean, Arden? You’re the new king, so they don’t care about Papa anymore?”

  “Something like that,” he said. “After all, he can’t do anything more for them, but I can.”

  He smiled, and for the first time, I realized that Arden wasn’t as upset about Papa’s dying as I thought he should be. He was the head of the household now, and he thought he didn’t need anyone else’s permission to do whatever he wanted.

  Then Arden surprised me by getting up to say a few words, honoring Papa for building such a successful business and promising everyone that he would do his best to uphold, protect, and further develop what Papa had begun. The speech ended up being more of an assurance to our customers that he would keep the business successful than it was an homage to Papa.

  When he was finished, he walked back to his seat beside me, his eyes searching my face for admiration and obedience, but instead, I turned away.

  “You could put aside your grief for a moment and compliment me,” he whispered, “especially in front of these people. I am your husband, the head of the household, dedicated to protecting you and Sylvia. I deserve respect, more respect, now.”

  “Today is Papa’s day,” I said. That was all I said, but it was enough.

  He turned away and didn’t even hold my hand at the grave site. I had my arm around Sylvia, who finally began to realize what was happening.

  “Audrina, we can’t leave Papa down there,” she said, when we were about to leave the cemetery.

  The funeral service workers would fill the grave after we all left. It was far too painful for me, and for Sylvia, to watch that. It was meant to be symbolic when Arden had thrown the first shovelful onto Papa’s lowered coffin. It seemed to me he did it eagerly, even joyfully.

  I could feel Sylvia’s body tighten. She whispered, “Nooooo,” but I tightened my arm around her and kept her from charging forward to stop him or anyone else from covering the coffin.

  I practically had to drag her away and at one point looked to Arden for help, but he was too busy shaking hands with those who had come to the burial. The way he was behaving made it seem he was conducting another business meeting. I even heard him mention some investment to Jonathan Logan, one of Papa’s oldest clients, claiming that before he had died, Papa had told him to tell Jonathan about it.

  More people came to our house than to the church or the cemetery. I understood from things I overheard that Arden had Mrs. Crown contact clients to give them the details of the funeral but also to make sure they knew that if the church service conflicted with something they’d rather do, they were more than welcome to come to the house. He was treating it more like a party. I knew that people needed to avoid excessive grief and needed hope more than depression, but the way Arden was organizing everything, I was almost expecting a band and dancing girls to show up.

  Arden’s boisterous conversations and continuous laughter stung. The whole thing confused Sylvia, who sometimes looked as if she might attack someone for smiling. I thought it best to get her up to her room, telling her to change and then lie down.

  “You don’t realize how tired you are,” I said.

  She looked afraid to close her eyes, but eventually, she did and fell asleep quickly.

  When I went downstairs, I was confronted again with loud laughter and conversation that had grown more raucous. More people had arrived. Arden had arranged for a bartender and two maids to serve hors d’oeuvres. I was determined to be polite, not festive. Many of the men greeted me with quick condolences, but thinking they had to, moved instantly to assure me that my husband was capable of carrying on.

  “After all, he was trained by an expert,” Rolf Nestor, one of Papa’s high-net-worth clients, told me. “You can be very proud of him.”

  Others said similar things to me, and when Arden, standing off to the side, overheard them, I could see his pleased, even arrogant glare. Eventually, too physically and emotionally drained to remain, I excused myself.

  “Of course, darling Audrina,” Ard
en said, loudly enough for everyone in the room to hear. “You’ve done more than enough for any father to be proud of you. He died knowing you would be well cared for, and you will be,” he vowed.

  I saw the way the women were looking at him admiringly, and the men were nodding. It was not too different from the way they would look at Papa when he was younger and more energetic. Ironically, Arden was becoming more like the man he had supposedly despised.

  I said nothing. My heart was too heavy. When I went upstairs, I checked on Sylvia first. She was still dead asleep. Out of habit, and maybe because I wanted to convince myself that this was not all a terrible nightmare, I opened the door to my father’s bedroom and stood there so full of wishful thinking that I imagined him propped up with two of his oversize pillows, his glasses slipping down the bridge of his nose, reading some economic charts or some company’s profit-and-loss statement. In his final years, although he was working less, he kept up the research and preparation to make sure that Arden made no significant blunders in his absence, the way he had in the beginning. In fact, now that I thought about it more, I could understand why he had wanted to keep Arden from galloping off with the company and thought that perhaps the stock division in my favor would make Arden more cautious. Papa always chose to be more conservative with other people’s money. He hated to be blamed for losses.

  Of course, the room was dark, the bed was empty, and the cold reality rushed back at me. I did all that I could to keep from fainting and then made my way quickly to our bedroom, changed into my nightgown, and slipped under the covers. Despite my fatigue, I thought I was going to lie there for hours and hours, breaking into sobs and then just staring at the darkness.

  Memories flowed freely around me. I could hear my mother playing the piano. I could see Papa’s look of admiration and love and also jealousy at the way other men looked at her, even when she was pregnant with Sylvia. I saw him reach for me so I would rush to him and sit on his lap when I was very little. We would both listen to Momma play. Out of the corner of my eye, I saw Aunt Ellsbeth standing in the doorway, holding Vera’s hand. Both looked envious, but for different reasons. Vera was always jealous of the love Papa showered on me, and Ellsbeth was simply jealous of her beautiful sister, who seemed to possess everything any woman would dream of having. She was always angry that Whitefern had been left principally to my mother and not to her.

  They tried not to say unpleasant things directly to each other. I recalled how they pretended to be Aunt Mercy Marie and used their imitations of her at their special Tuesday “teatimes” to let loose all the venom toward each other that they usually held back. Aunt Mercy Marie’s picture was on the piano. She looked like a queen, wealthy, with diamonds hanging from her ears. Aunt Ellsbeth would hold the picture up in front of her and change her voice to say nasty things, and Momma would do the same. I was still unsure about what had eventually happened to my great-aunt after she had gone to Africa. The family thought it was possible she had been captured by heathens and eaten by cannibals.

  It was all those conflicting memories that finally drove me to the end of exhaustion and pushed me into sleep, a sleep so deep that I didn’t hear Arden come up much later. What woke me was the stench of alcohol. He was being clumsy, too, and quite inconsiderate, banging into chairs, mumbling loudly, slamming a glass down on a shelf in the bathroom, and then practically falling into the bed so that my body bounced as if I were on a trampoline.

  “Are you awake?” he asked. “Huh?”

  I tried to pretend I somehow was not, but he nudged me. “What?” I grumbled at last.

  “You heard them.”

  “Heard who?”

  “Our clients. You see how important it is that the business be completely under my control now,” he said, sounding sober. “We can’t give anyone the impression that we’re not as solid as ever. If they so much as suspected someone without real knowledge of today’s market was involved in their business, they’d leave us in droves. We have to talk about this, and you must do what I tell you.”

  “We’ll talk tomorrow,” I said.

  “Ah, tomorrow . . . tomorrow . . . Your father wasn’t in his right mind, I tell you. Well? Well?”

  I wouldn’t answer him.

  Finally, he turned onto his side, his back to me. I was trying to fall back asleep, but then he muttered, “Your sister was crying hysterically in your father’s room.”

  “What?”

  He didn’t respond.

  “What did you say?” I sat up.

  Still, he didn’t respond. In a moment, he was snoring.

  I rose and found my robe and slippers. Then I went to Papa’s bedroom. The door was open again, but when I looked in, I didn’t see Sylvia. I turned on a light and even looked into Papa’s bathroom, but she wasn’t there. Arden must have imagined it in his drunken stupor, I concluded, and I turned off the lights. Instead of returning to bed, I went to Sylvia’s room.

  For a few moments, I stood in her doorway and peered into the darkness. The curtains at the windows had been left open, but the sky was overcast. There wasn’t even starlight. In fact, I thought I heard the tinkling of raindrops against the glass. I stepped in and immediately realized that Sylvia was not in her bed. I checked her bathroom and then hurried downstairs.

  The living room had been cleaned up halfheartedly. Spilled drinks and bits of food were everywhere; there would be a lot of work to do tomorrow. Sylvia wasn’t there.

  I headed for the kitchen. Maybe she had gone down for a snack, since she had eaten nothing. There were many nights when I had found her doing just that. Sometimes Papa would be with her, and they would both be having a piece of cake or cookies with milk or tea. I assumed she recalled those nights and had gone to the kitchen, driven by memories.

  But she wasn’t there, either.

  “Sylvia?” I called.

  I checked every room, every bathroom. Growing frantic now, I hurried up to the cupola, but that was empty, too.

  The realization thundered around me. Sylvia wasn’t in the house! I thought about waking Arden to tell him, but when I looked in on him, he was snoring even louder. He’d be of no help and grumpy for sure, I thought. But where was she? Where would she go?

  I went to the closet in the entryway and put on one of my overcoats. Taking an umbrella, I stepped out and looked for her on the porch.

  “Sylvia?” I cried. “Where are you? Sylvia?”

  The rain was coming down harder, and the wind was now icy. A thick fog had blanketed the grounds and the woods. It was late October, but fall was obviously being crushed by a heavy oncoming winter. Realizing that I was still in my slippers, I returned to the entryway closet and took out a pair of Papa’s black leather boots. My feet swam in them, but I was able to walk out and down the stairs with the umbrella shielding me somewhat. I had no idea where to look. Over and over, I called out her name. She wasn’t anywhere nearby. Where could she be?

  And then a terrifying possibility seemed to rush out of the bitter darkness and wash over me.

  “Oh, Sylvia,” I muttered. “Poor Sylvia.”

  I hurried down the path and through the woods as fast as I could, the rain soaking my face, but I was too frightened to feel the cold now. It was a long walk, a walk I couldn’t imagine her doing, but a dozen or so yards from the cemetery, I heard it—a shovel—and I broke into a run, clomping along in Papa’s oversize boots and nearly falling a few times.

  Finally, I was there and saw her, in only her night-gown, digging away at Papa’s grave, the rain soaking her so that she was as good as naked.

  “Sylvia!” I screamed. “What are you doing?”

  She paused and turned to me. “We can’t leave him down there,” she said. “Papa. It’s cold and dark. We can’t leave him, Audrina. Just like we didn’t leave you.”

  “No . . . oh, no, Sylvia. I was never dead. Papa is dead. Papa needs to stay there. He needs to stay near Momma.”

  I reached for the shovel. She held on to it tightly.
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  “Please, Sylvia, leave Papa to rest in peace. You’re going to get pneumonia out here. He would be very angry at you.”

  “Angry? Papa? At me?”

  “Yes, very. And mad at me for letting you do this. He’s probably screaming at us now. Come on. Come back to the house. I need to get you into a warm bath. Come on,” I said more forcefully, and pulled the shovel out of her grip.

  She stumbled, and I put my arm around her waist, threw the shovel down, and, holding the umbrella above both of us as best I could, led her out of the cemetery and quickly back to the house. It was raining even harder. It seemed to take longer to get home. A few times, she paused to turn back, but I overpowered her and warned her again that Papa would be angry.

  When I finally got her inside, I helped her out of her soaked nightgown and used some towels from the powder room to dry her off. After I took off my coat and Papa’s boots, I led her up the stairs and to her bedroom, sitting her on her bed while I ran her bath. Once she was submerged in the warm water, I washed her neck and shoulders and gave her hair a quick shampoo. She was quiet now, seemingly very tired.

  I stood up and took off my own damp nightgown. The tub was big enough for the two of us. We had taken baths together occasionally. I ran some more hot water. She opened her eyes when I got in and sat facing her.

  “Audrina,” she said insistently, “you came out of your grave. Papa can come out of his, too.”

  I closed my eyes. How would I ever get her to understand, when half the time, I didn’t understand myself? “Not tonight,” I said. That answer would have to do for now. “Not tonight.”

  We sat soaking for nearly half an hour, and then, after we got out and dried ourselves off, we put on new nightgowns. I blow-dried her hair and mine, and then I crawled into bed beside her, which was where Arden found us both in the morning, sleeping, embracing each other, probably looking like two lovers to him.

  “Hey,” he said, when I opened my eyes. “When did you come in here this time? Are you going to do this every night? I’ll get a bigger bed, and the three of us can sleep together.”