Beauty From Ashes (26 page)

Still looking at the spacious white frame house, Pete asked, “Do the Bostwicks use this lane often?”

Louisa laughed. “It certainly doesn’t seem like it, does it? I believe some of their relatives are here off and on, but it does stand empty for much of the time. Don’t forget, this is the first day in weeks I’ve given myself a respite from that hotel my poor husband manages. I work right along with him. You won’t, I fear, learn the latest happenings from me. But there just may be a chance that the `kind, welcoming` house is empty now. I see the lawn could stand a good, sharp scythe.”

“Do you suppose it could be available?” Pete was fairly shouting with excitement. “I can tell Mama loves it!”

“How do you know I love it?” Anne asked.

“Oh, I can tell. It’s easy. You always think you’re doing a good job of masking the real

look in those beautiful eyes of yours, 341 Mama, but you almost never do. Don’t you think she loves the house, Mrs. Fletcher?”

“I refuse to be caught between the two of you, but I must say you delight me, Pete.”

“I do?”

“We all need to laugh more. Our blessed Lord created facial muscles so that it is far easier to smile than to look sour, so, yes. You delight me, young lady.”

“Thank you, ma’am,” Pete grinned. “Did you hear that, Mama?”

“I heard. And by the minute, Louisa, my own desire to know whether or not that Bostwick house— the kind one—might be available is growing by leaps and bounds as we sit here talking. I do try to be practical, but I’m not really.”

“Hooray for you, Mama!” Pete exclaimed. “How can we find out, Mrs. Fletcher? Would your husband know?”

“My husband almost always needs a nudge except to try to get me up and going earlier of a morning, but I’ll certainly nudge him to start inquiring this very afternoon.” She glanced at the gold watch around her neck. “I’m sorry to say this,

but I should be getting back to the Howard House. I do have a three-year-old daughter, and her nurse, who has varying degrees of rheumatism, has to see Dr. Slaughter today. We can always come back over here tomorrow, Anne. And by then, I’ll have found out about your kind house. It is a charming place, isn’t it? I’d seen it fairly often, of course, but especially on this nice sunny day, it’s—it’s—I’ll use your word this time, Pete. In this sunlight, it’s welcoming!”

For a moment they sat looking at the simple, clean lines of the elegant white house. Then Anne said, “It looks to be in reasonably good condition.”

“It should be,” Louisa offered. “It isn’t ten years old.”

“I’d want it to be comfortable for us during our stay here,” Anne went on dreamily, “but even on a rainy day I know I’ll see it as it is right now, with the sun overhead. The truth is, ever since the day we buried my husband, Louisa, a certain kind of light has kept me going. Whether we can ever live in it, I’ll see it always in my mind’s eye with this high-noon light

on it.” 343

Almost a whole week passed before Louisa Fletcher was able to tell Anne and Pete that the white-light house, as Anne was now calling it, was indeed to be for rent sometime early in the new year, at what seemed the fair figure of thirty dollars a month. There was even the possibility that the Bostwicks would be willing to sell the house with payments of the same amount.

“That long!” Pete exclaimed. “Things move even slower up here than down on the coast, and it won’t take us that long to get our things packed and ready to move, Mama. This is March 18. What will we do while we wait all that time?”

“We’ll just be about our business as usual, dear,” her mother said in that calm, maddening way she had when she was purposely trying not to act excited or too hopeful. “I’ll want to spend a few weeks with Anna Matilda King. I’d love to talk and talk with dear Miss Eliza Mackay in Savannah, and by the time I can get to Savannah, Frances Anne

may be living there. At least her boy Menzies thinks she will be. Wasn’t it thoughtful of him to come by to see us from Reverend White’s school yesterday?”

“I’m as fond of old Menzies as you are, but our subject of conversation right now isn’t his courtesy, but how long we’ll have to wait before we can move to Marietta to live!”

“Have you been so wretched with the way we’ve spent our time on the coast since we had to leave our beloved little Lawrence cottage, Pete?”

“Sure. Haven’t you been miserable, too, Mama?”

“Oh, Pete, I don’t know. I don’t seem to know very much of anything these days.”

“Except that you do want with all your heart to live with Fanny and Selina and Eve and me in the white-light house, don’t you? You aren’t going to let this long delay spoil everything, are you? I’ve been so hopeful about you since we found that house, Mama. And the rent is really fair even if we can’t buy it. Please don’t crawl back into your shell again!”

“I’m not crawling anywhere. I think I just need to be by myself for a while now. Anyway,

Mrs. Wilder’s due soon to take you 345 back to Oakton long enough to be sure everything’s been packed that you left in your room out there when you came here to the Howard House last week. You’d better hurry upstairs for your cape. It’s even chilly in this dining room today.” On a long sigh, she added, “Hard to believe how warm and mild it may be on St. Simons in mid-March, isn’t it?”

“Stop that, Mama.”

“Stop what?”

“Stop comparing the clear, dry, brisk air of Marietta with all that warm, muggy coastal stuff Fanny has such trouble breathing into her poor lungs. And stop dwelling on how homesick you’ve always been away from the Island. I already know that and if I could wave a magic wand, I’d bring Papa back and Grandpapa and Grandmama and Annie and open up Cannon’s Point with Sans Foix in the kitchen, move us back to Lawrence, and make your whole life perfect again. I can’t do that. No matter how much John Couper and Fanny and Selina and I all wish we could, we can’t. John Couper and I are doing the best we know how to try to help you find a new

life up here. One you can take part in. We’ll have a handsome house one day that will be ours. You’ll make more new friends like Mrs.

Fletcher and—was

“You’re certainly smart enough to know there probably isn’t one other woman like Louisa Fletcher in the whole state of Georgia!” Anne took a deep breath and tried to smile. “Did you ever see anyone with eyes as expressive and understanding as hers? She is a most understanding woman, Pete.”

“But I’m not. Is that what you’re talking in circles about?”

“No, no, no! Far from it. If I’m talking in circles, it’s because I’m living in circles. Listen to me. When I lost your sister Annie, I was sure I’d never find anyone else anywhere—in or out of our family—with her sensitive, woman’s understanding. The truth is, I have. You, Pete.”

With her father’s half-wicked grin, Pete said, “You didn’t have to go that far, Mama.”

For a long moment Anne sat there, her second cup of coffee cooling while she studied her daughter. Finally she said, as though just discovering the truth, “You don’t need to be reassured about much

of anything, do you, dear? You’ve always 347 known who you are. You’ve always known exactly what you think. We’ve all treated you like an impetuous tomboy and tried to rein you in when you probably knew better than we did—about the things that truly matter.”

Attempting, as always, to lighten the moment, Pete pretended to be looking around the dining room —even under the white tablecloth—for the mythical person her mother just might be referring to. Then they both laughed.

“Maybe best of all,” Anne said, still smiling, “you’re not one bit touchy, are you? Look here, I’ll give you a big head if I keep this up, but you’re a combination of the best and most lovable in both your papa and your grandpapa. I can’t pay you a higher compliment than that, but it was more than a compliment. What I just said is the truth.”

In her impetuous way, Pete reached across the small table for her mother’s hand and kissed it—right in the public dining room. “To prove I’m sensitive, too, I’m on my way right this minute to our room for my cape, and on the way I’ll order another cup of hot coffee for the dearest mother anyone ever had. Maybe you do need

to be alone, and that’s good because Mrs. Wilder’s driver is probably already waiting out in the Square to take me to Oakton to finish collecting my stuff.”

In a not very ladylike move, Pete jumped to her feet and strode on her long legs out of the dining room. From the doorway she turned to give Anne another reassuring smile, which declared loudly, as Pete had always preferred to declare everything, that their lives were going to be all right.

Later, upstairs alone in their hotel room, Anne sat by the window, sipping the excellent coffee Louisa Fletcher had insisted on sending up to allow her guest to escape the party of travelers just descended on the busy dining room. She meant to spend ample time this morning, while Pete was at Oakton, writing in her neglected diary. Today, somehow, following Mama’s instructions to keep the diary current seemed important. Of late, Anne had begun to sort things out with more clarity as she wrote. Wise Mama. At times overly proper and self-contained, but almost always wiser than anyone else at Cannon’s Point. Wiser than

Papa? Anne smiled to herself. Yes, 349 if she were truthful, because Papa was always impetuous and seldom hesitant to speak his mind with or without much forethought. One of the thousand reasons I felt comfortable with him, adored being with him, she thought. Just before Papa died, though, he confessed to her that it was his Becca who, all those years ago, had accepted John long before he was able to bring himself to do it.

John.

“John?” Speaking his name aloud, even discussing matters with him, had recently become almost natural. If only she knew what he thought of the white-light house! She really had no doubt that he would be on Pete’s side all the way. Her half smile at the still-vivid memory of his spontaneity turned her thoughts again to their daughter Pete and how much she was like him. Had Anne only this morning seen the surprising extent of Pete’s understanding of her? Had Anne ever truly tried to understand her own mother? Could she have understood the wellborn lady Rebecca Maxwell Couper if she’d tried harder?

“I am living in circles, John,” she said aloud into the empty hotel room. “I try with

our children, but my thoughts circle and circle and usually end exactly where they began, showing little or no movement backward or ahead. If only we could talk, dearest! If only you could say something to me. Anything, just anything.”

The coffee finished, she set the cup and saucer on a small table beside the stiff armchair and picked up her diary from the same table. Another smile came when she realized that when they lived at Lawrence, she’d guarded that diary, even from the prying eyes of her own children. From Eve. Still, even though Pete had been sharing her room for almost a week, Anne hadn’t given a thought to concealing the small, blue grosgrain-covered book. Pete was—Pete. And being Pete was turning out to be far more laudable than even her mother had suspected. The young woman might always need to be toned down here and there, but Anne could no more imagine Pete’s invading someone else’s privacy by reading mail or a diary than she could imagine the girl’s being a mother! That thought had never struck before. Willing, helpful Fanny? Oh, yes. Fanny would one day be a near-perfect mother. Even young Selina showed signs of the gentle tenderness needed to nurture and guide young lives.

Maybe especially Selina. But 351 Pete? One thing certain, if Pete did marry and have children, those children could never take their mother for granted.

“John darling,” she said aloud again, “how dreadful for you to miss knowing, enjoying, being surprised by, the differences in our offspring! I’m trying so hard to learn to live cheerfully, creatively, for their sake, but it’s still so hard to accept the ugly fact that you’re deprived of watching them mature and change, become such distinct personalities.”

Seated at the small desk now, Anne uncapped the inkwell and turned to a fresh page in her diary.

Tuesday, 18 March 1851

Howard House

Marietta, Georgia

Once more I have neglected writing in these pages since the day after I reached Marietta by train a week ago. I have no excuse beyond my seeming inability to keep up with all that might be happening. Pete, who has been here for some time at the house of John Couper’s Savannah

friends the Wilders, is with me, sharing this hotel room and continuing to surprise her muddled mother hourly. She is now on her way back to the Wilders’ rented cottage, called Oakton, on the edge of town, and while the girl is striking me as wiser by far than I thought, she is also pushing me to a decision. One I fear I must make rather soon. Mrs. Wilder has done her best to accompany or direct Pete to various small houses in Marietta, which we might at least rent for a time, as blessed John Couper says, to give his mother a chance to sort things out in a place she can at least call a temporary home. The children are all trying so hard in their ways to help me find my balance again, and I grow increasingly guilty because I can’t seem to do it.

My landlady, Mrs. Louisa Fletcher, whose husband, Dix, manages the Howard House, could well be my reason for deciding to try life in Marietta—away from my beloved coast—if I decide that way. So many ifs. So, so many ifs. How I need my John Couper to help me make top or bottom of something! The boy vows he will be able, with my help from his father’s

pension, to pay rent and cover our modest 353 needs. Fanny can take in some sewing, Pete can tutor at least part-time, and I can try to learn how to make our meager means stretch as far as possible. Now, the decision of the moment seems to be mine. With the help of Louisa Fletcher, the highly intelligent, unusually well-read and educated landlady, rapidly becoming a choice friend, Pete and I found a splendid house on nine acres of land off Decatur Street, a few blocks from the town Square. The truth, which I trust only to these pages, is that I already love the house shamefully and am determined to try to buy it! I write the word shamefully because I am sure that even thirty dollars a month will be too expensive for us and could work a severe hardship on poor, good John Couper. The house is at least partly furnished and will not be available to us until early next year. It seems a member of the Bostwick family, who own it, needs it for that length of time, although it is at present empty and Louisa assures me that Pete and I can see inside it this very afternoon. And that there is nothing else available to compare. The house is classic Greek Revival, painted