It’s been ages since Mother and Father have been missing You haven’t come to see poor little me in
June 14, 1938
Dear Brother,
It’s 3:14 and I can’t persuade myself to go to bed. Once I’m there, nothing will stand between me and my fate. My dreadful suitcase is packed, along with my dreadful hatbox and dreadful trunk. Mattie pressed my white suit for the train, and it’s hanging over my chair, gleaming like the full moon, impossible to ignore. It’s been a horrid evening. Mother insisted that we dine at home, just the three of us, but Father is still not speaking to me, and I was too oppressed to swallow, so Mother chattered on and on about something—azaleas? dressing gowns?—for a solid hour. The moment he had stowed the last bite of ham in his mouth, Father lurched to his feet to make his getaway—but he patted my head as he went by. I wanted to wail like a baby.
Oh, Lance, I’m going to be all alone, and I’ve never been that before. Even when I was sent off to Miss Telt’s Seminary, they all knew who I was—Senator Beck’s daughter. I don’t suppose that will cut much ice in the hog wallows of Macedonia, West Virginia. How will I know what to do?
Layla
P.S. Won’t you please try one more time to find it in your heart to take me in? Please, Lance? I’ve been thinking about what you said, and I know you were right about lots of it, but I’m sure I would improve with your brotherly guidance. You could be my model. Please?
3
In later years, Bird said she knew from the very beginning that Layla Beck was trouble. “From the moment I saw her,” Bird would say, sticking one finger straight up in the air, “I knew she was a harbinger of doom.” There are times when my sister talks like an old man.
I can’t say, myself. I wasn’t with Bird when she saw Layla Beck for the first time. I was lying face down in the gutter with tire tracks on the backs of my knees, which Bird says is proof of Layla Beck’s being a harbinger and I say is proof of Bird’s being a skunk.
We had been sent to the train station to greet Miss Beck and show her to our home. If she had arrived on the 10:43 or the 12:10 or the 5:25, Bird and I would not have been nearly important enough to be her welcoming committee. All three of our aunts—Jottie, Minerva, and Mae—would have gone in their Sunday hats and gloves. But Miss Layla Beck came in on the 2:05, and that was plunk in the middle of my aunts’ sacred resting time. So they consulted among themselves and announced that meeting Miss Beck was valuable social grooming for Bird and me.
Jottie, who cared how we looked, made us wash our knees, and after that, she brushed Bird’s curls. She started to braid my hair, but that turned out to be beyond the powers of mortal man, just like it usually was. It was slippery, my hair. Anyway, we looked nice, or at least clean, when we set out to meet Miss Layla Beck on the 2:05 from Washington, D.C. Our aunts waved us good-bye and went off to do their resting, Jottie in her chair in the front room, and Minerva and Mae upstairs in the room they shared when they stayed with us, flung down on the beds, breathing in and out at the same time, the way twins do.
It was up to Bird and me to make a nice impression, Jottie said. I said I would do my best but not to get her hopes up, and she laughed.
Outside, it was dead quiet and hot. The birds had given up for the day, and heat steamed from our neighbors’ lawns in shining columns. Nothing stirred. The ladies and the little babies were taking their naps, and the Lloyd boys, who would be quiet on the day they died and not before, had gone off somewhere. The men were at work, except for Grandpa Pucks, who never spoke except to tell us to get lost, and Mr. Harvill, who was a high school teacher and on summer vacation just like us.
Bird and I trudged along Academy Street in silence. I suppose if you’d never seen them before, the houses on our street all looked the same, big and white-brick. If you gazed through the polished lens of experience, though, each one was different. You could tell where the Lloyd boys lived, just from the frayed stump of rope that dangled from their maple tree. The swing had crashed to the ground when all three of them plus Dicky Ritts rode on it at once. Grandpa Pucks’s porch was bare because he believed that burglars would steal his rocker if he left it out. Every evening, he toted it out to the porch to sit in the cool, but he wouldn’t tote Grandma Pucks’s. She had to sit inside. At the corner was the Caseys’ house, empty and sad. Mr. Casey got sick and died, and Mrs. Casey and the children had to go live with her brother. Sometimes on Sundays, Mrs. Casey came back to water her peonies. It didn’t help much; they were dying.
I looked sideways. Bird was concentrating on her feet. The road had melted soft and we had to pick our way along, like cats. We could have walked the fences, but that would have grubbed up our fronts, and we were supposed to look nice for Miss Beck.
“Willa!”
It was Mrs. Spencer Bensee, behind her grape arbor. The grapes tasted awful, but the arbor was pretty and she spent loads of time in it, thinking about the roses of yesteryear, according to Jottie.
“Afternoon, Mrs. Bensee. It’s hot, isn’t it?”
“You-all should be napping. Does Jottie know you’re running around in this heat?” she said sharply.
“Yes’m,” I answered. The things children have to put up with.
“Humph,” said Mrs. Bensee doubtfully. Then she relented. “You’re looking pretty as a picture today, Bird,” she called.
Bird didn’t say anything, not even when I nudged her. That was always the way. No matter how nice and polite I was, Bird was the one people fussed over. It was because she had those fluffy golden curls, just like the good girls in books. Not that Bird was especially good; when she put her mind to it, she was downright awful, but she looked good, like a Christmas card girl.
“Bye, Mrs. Bensee! We’ve got to get to the station!” I hollered, so that she wouldn’t notice that Bird had been rude. “Why can’t you be nice?” I hissed when we were out of earshot.
Bird shrugged. “I’m nice.”
“Not to her, you’re not.”
Bird shrugged again. “She sits in that arbor waiting to kill people.”
We got to Race Street, and from there we had to cross over to the United Garage and go around the corner. Radio music was floating out of the United Garage, and I could hear them banging on something in there, metal on metal. Which is why I didn’t hear Teddy Bowers on his shiny new bike as I stepped out to cross the road. I didn’t see him, either, because I turned my head to look both ways, just like they were forever telling us to do. Before I knew it, I was flat out on the macadam, with Teddy Bowers moaning and screaming about his bike being ruined. I never liked him after that. The bike had come to a stop on top of me, and as I lay there, kicking my legs out like a sick horse, I felt a little tap on my shoulder. It was Bird.
“Don’t you worry,” she said. For a moment I thought she was trying to comfort me, and I was surprised, because she didn’t usually comfort anyone. I should have known better. “I can meet the train all by myself.” Very carefully, Bird looked both ways to see that no cars were coming. “Bye,” she called over her shoulder as she walked away.
She disappeared around the corner, and Teddy finally summoned the wit to yank his bike off my legs, scraping off plenty of skin as he went. I called him a few things I wasn’t supposed to know about, before I saw the blood running down my legs; then I began to cry, and one of the United Garage men heard me and came out.
He paid no mind to Teddy howling in the street—What did Teddy have to howl about? No one had run him down—and he was real nice about me bleeding all over the front seat of his truck. I told him where I lived, and he said he knew already. “The president’s house,” he said. He sounded solemn, like the president of the United States lived there, but he was really talking about my grandfather, St. Clair Romeyn. He’d been the president of American Everlasting, back when he was alive. “I know your aunts, too,” added the United Garage man.
“All of them?” I asked, to take his mind off the blood that was dribbling onto the floor of his truck. H
e kept looking at it, kind of nervous.
“I went to school with Miss Minerva and Miss Mae.”
“Oh.” I searched my mind for something to say about that. “I’ve got three of them. Aunts.”
“They sure were pretty,” he said, like he was remembering.
I thought they wouldn’t like to hear him talk as if they weren’t pretty now, but I didn’t say that, because his old truck was stopping in front of our house. A moment later, Jottie burst out of the front porch, letting the screen door bang behind her. I opened my mouth to explain, but she was already flying down the front stairs, and then her fingers were curling tight around my shoulders. She held me close for a second. “You’re all right,” she said. “You’re all right,” she repeated, like she was telling herself.
“Yeah, Jottie, I’m—” I began, but now she whirled around to glare at the United Garage man.
“What happened, Neely?”
Poor United Garage man. He swallowed weakly and said, “Hey there, Jottie, I just picked her up off the street—over there in front of the garage, you know where—and,” he stammered, “and—I didn’t do nothing!”
“Yes, ma’am, he picked me up from being run over,” I said fast. “Teddy Bowers ran me over on his new bike and stupid Bird left me lying in the street and went on to the station, at least I think that’s where she is, so he”—I nodded to the United Garage man—“he brought me home in his truck, and the blood is mostly in my shoes.”
“Why, Neely!” Now Mae came down the steps, just as light as a feather. She glanced around at the three of us. “What happened?” she asked, but the way she said it was a lot friendlier than the way Jottie had.
His eyes got big and scared-looking. He didn’t say anything, just jerked his thumb at me. Mae looked like she might laugh, but I felt sorry for him, so I spoke up and said again about Teddy and how Mr. Neely had brought me home.
Mae smiled at him. “Aren’t you nice.”
He nodded, but he still didn’t say anything, so I kind of yelled, “Look, Mae, look at my legs! That rotten Teddy ran into me, and then he scraped all the skin off my legs. And then he had the nerve to cry about his bike. Can you believe that?”
“Bowerses are crybabies, every last one of them,” she said soothingly, just as Minerva came out to see what all the fuss was about.
“Why, Willa! You’re blood-drenched!” she said.
“I know it,” I said, but she had already turned to Mr. United Garage.
“And Neely’s here, too! What happened?”
We all swung around to see if he would answer this time, but that seemed to shake him worse. “Ha-ha,” he mumbled.
“I’ve got blood all in my shoe!” I said.
Minerva nodded. “You look something terrible.”
“I was just trying to help Bird across the street,” I said, real noble and self-sacrificing. The grown-ups who circled around me made sympathetic noises. My leg had almost stopped hurting, and I began to enjoy myself some. “I scraped up my hands, too,” I said, stretching out my bloody palms to show them. Obediently, they leaned in to look.
All at once, Jottie clutched her throat. “It’s a sign!”
Minerva giggled. “Why, so it is.”
“The stigmata!” Jottie gasped. “She’s got the stigmata!” She did some staggering.
Mae began to laugh. “Call Reverend Dews!” she cried. “It’s a miracle!”
And at that moment, Bird’s voice wafted over the heads of the grown-ups. “May I present Miss Layla Beck.”
Suddenly all the faces that had been looking at me turned away, and I was left staring at a circle of backs. I pushed through them and saw a young lady with shining dark curls. She was wearing the whitest suit I ever saw and white high-heeled shoes to match. She could have been getting married in that suit, except she was wearing a red bow around her neck. She had big brown eyes and a mouth the exact shade of her neck bow, but one lip was tucked into her teeth. “Miss Romeyn?” she said, looking, for some reason, at me.
“No,” I answered. But then I reconsidered. “Well, yes, but”—I pointed to Jottie—“she’s really Miss Romeyn. I mean, she’s the Miss Romeyn you’re talking about.” I shifted on my feet, and blood came up out of my shoe.
Jottie was trying to straighten her face out. “Please excuse us—”
“She doesn’t really have the stigmata,” said Mae weakly.
“Not yet, anyway,” whispered Minerva.
There was a strangling sound as all three of my aunts tried to swallow their laughs.
And after that there was a long, empty space where Miss Layla Beck should have said something about being pleased to meet us but didn’t. She stared at my legs, and then her eyes moved over Mae, Minerva, the United Garage man, and, finally, Jottie. She looked at us like we had escaped from the asylum.
The tap of shoes against brick broke the spell. We all swiveled round to see my father striding up the front path.
“Father!” I cried.
He stopped and smiled. “Miss Beck,” he said, taking off his hat. “Welcome to Macedonia.” He held out his hand.
“Welcome to Macedonia,” said Felix, stepping forward into the circle.
In the time it took him to do it, Jottie’s eyes swept around the ring of faces, examining the citizens of this tiny world. Neely, she saw, was scared. Poor Neely. He was scared of them, and he was scared they were going to invite him into the house. He was scared that if he went inside, he’d break something or track dirt on the rug. Don’t worry, she wanted to whisper to him. It’s not like it used to be. It’s not so fancy anymore.
Neely swallowed nervously.
Beside him stood Minerva, reviewing Miss Beck with narrowed eyes. Mae was doing the same. Jottie watched as their opinion made its identical appearance on their faces: They were offended. They were offended primarily by the stranger’s suit—a white suit, the nerve!—but they were also taking offense at her gleaming curls, her wide eyes, her red lips, and her slender waist. She was a boarder, a border. She was supposed to be meager and pale, clad in a one-dollar dress and last year’s hat, eager to please and easy to ignore. She was not supposed to make them the second-prettiest women in the house.
Now Bird strained forward around Miss Beck, trying to catch her father’s eye, so he might witness her in her moment of glory. Under Jottie’s gaze, she assumed the noble visage of a child who had fulfilled her duty when others fell by the wayside, a child who struggled on alone to guide a stranger to safety.
But Felix wasn’t noticing Bird’s glory; he was extending his hand to the newcomer. “Felix Romeyn,” he said, tapping his hat against his chest, his eyes warm and welcoming. Oh, Felix, don’t smile at her, Jottie thought. The poor girl.
He smiled.
The stranger smiled back, her hand rising to meet his and grasp it, clearly relieved to encounter this envoy from the realm of the normal. “I’m Layla Beck,” she said, the furrows smoothing from her brow. “Delighted to meet you.” They shook hands, and she turned, newly fortified, to Minerva. “Miss Romeyn?”
Felix placed two fingers against her shoulder and gently spun her toward Jottie.
Her turn. Jottie stepped forward. “I am Miss Romeyn,” she said, a bit breathlessly. Stigmata. Honestly. She didn’t know what got into her sometimes. She smiled. “You must think us utterly—” The girl gazed at her coolly; she thought nothing at all. Abashed, Jottie veered to: “So pleased to meet you.”
As she beheld the two tiny, inconsequential versions of herself reflected in Miss Layla Beck’s eyes, Jottie permitted herself a fraction of a second to mourn for Tremendous Wilson, the perfect boarder, meek as living man could be, who each night retreated upstairs to his own dim circle of lamplight, casting no shadow on the Romeyns below. Tremendous Wilson had lived in Macedonia all his life. He knew what they’d been and what they’d become and how it had happened. But Tremendous was gone, not to be retrieved, and now there was this girl, glinting and fresh and ignorant as an egg. A girl
so smooth and empty that her thoughts could be read like telegrams. There it was, appearing on her face as Jottie watched, the certainty that Macedonia and the Romeyns were minor elements in the plot of her life, ants who happened to be plodding through her picnic, rather than the other way around. It was written in the careless determination with which she was shaking hands now with Mae and Minerva, in the way she was pretending not to see the blood browning on Willa’s sock, in her unnecessary, brilliant smile for Neely. She had no need to know them. She would soon move on.
I will never move on, thought Jottie, and a stab of envy nearly broke her in two.
Quickly as she foundered, she retrieved herself. Greet the stranger. Now smile. Shake her hand. As her arm obeyed instructions, Jottie took refuge in her ballast, counting her treasures, her darlings: Willa, Bird, her sisters, even Felix—all of them loved her, needed her, held her dear. She didn’t want to move on anyway.
The ship righted itself, and Jottie drew a breath. “Please do come in out of the heat of the day, Miss Beck. Thought you weren’t coming home until Thursday, Felix. Mae, will you take Willa upstairs and put something on that leg of hers—and take that sock off, too, honey. Thank you kindly, Neely, for bringing her home. And there’s no call for you to look so puffed up, Miss Bird. You shouldn’t leave your sister lying in the street.”
For a moment, the circle held, unmoving, and then, as though touched by fire, it broke apart, whirling away on the updraft of Jottie’s words.
Walking toward the house, Jottie heard a familiar one-note whistle and dropped behind the others. Felix slipped his arm companionably through hers. “The girls behave themselves?” he asked, as he always did.
“Tolerable,” she answered, as she always did. “Where were you this time?” she asked.
“Obion, Tennessee.”