“They’ll understand. They’ll be talking a lot about Helen and Zion. I don’t need to be there.”
Nonie was finally quiet. I knew she meant well. I also knew that, like me, she hadn’t cared much for the Heasters. When they came to the house, she stayed in her room and listened to the radio or watched the television we had bought her for her fiftieth birthday (Press thought it was fine to indulge Nonie, but he believed televisions were foolish and plebeian and wouldn’t own one). She referred to them as “those New York people” and was unimpressed with Zion’s booming voice and full, leonine hair and the way Rachel and Jack and Preston hung on his every word. Also in the silence between us was the knowledge that she had been out of town when Eva died. Her guilt, I knew, was comparable to my own. But she had still cared for Michael when I couldn’t. No real grandmother could have done better.
I did get up and dress and wash my face a few minutes after she took a very wound-up, sleepy Michael back to the nursery. Time was still slow. But when I left my room, I saw through eyes that hadn’t cried that day.
In the hallway, I was assaulted by the smell of decaying flowers: lilies and roses and carnations, sent or brought to the house even days after Eva’s funeral. They were scattered in vases downstairs and on the second-floor gallery, which was where the family’s bedrooms were. Press’s and my bedrooms, the nursery, and Nonie’s room were all on the eastern side of the house. Olivia’s rooms and two guest rooms were directly opposite, across the wide expanse of the hall, which was open to the third floor and the ceiling’s dome. I stood looking over the gallery railing, remembering how the church had also smelled heavily of flowers during Eva’s church service.
The hall and gallery walls—upstairs and down—were covered with paintings. There were many portraits, mostly Bliss family members, but a few from Olivia’s family as well, including one of her stern, plain-faced parents. As I went down the front stairs, I stopped, arrested by the portrait we’d had done of a two-year-old Eva and me that was hung above the landing near the bottom of the stairs. It was a very feminine painting, set in the rose garden with the maze blurred in the background, and full of the colors of late spring. In contrast, we wore ivory dresses: a tea gown for me, a simple silk dress piped in pink for Eva, who sat at my feet, her hand resting on a stuffed white peacock wearing a gold crown. I hadn’t wanted it in the painting, but Press’s friend J. C. Jaquith had had it sent from F.A.O. Schwartz in New York, and it pleased Press that it was a peacock and that Eva loved it, so I had relented. I didn’t like the way its head was tilted, as though its sharp orange beak were about to strike our daughter on the knee, but Press had laughed and said the artist was just having a joke.
Why had Olivia wanted it here in the hall, rather than in the salon or in one of the sunnier rooms? She’d never said, but had had it hung while I was out of the house, in time for a dinner party she was giving in honor of the painting’s completion. She’d had me dress Eva in the dress from the portrait, even though it was, by then, a bit too small. Press had beamed, holding Eva like a prize, as we stood beneath the painting for the assembled guests. Eva had smiled placidly and even clapped her hands along with the guests. I was anxious, not liking the attention, the stares of Olivia’s Historical Society friends and bridge partners and their husbands.
Now I wondered if I could bear to look at the portrait every day. As I passed it in the afternoon sunlight, I ran my fingertips over the edge of the frame. It was hung too high for me to touch the textured paint strokes that made up my daughter’s face.
I found Marlene in the kitchen making bread for our dinner. She had twisted her hair into its usual chignon, and wore a full white apron over her dark gray dress.
“I’d like all the funeral flowers removed, Marlene. Have any more notes arrived?”
She looked up, startled, the half-smile I’d seen on her lips before she’d heard me fading into a look of surprise.
“No, Miss Charlotte. Mr. Preston may have met the postman on his way into town. There’s been no mail delivered here today.”
Both Marlene and Terrance called Press by the familiar Mr. Preston, and referred to me as Miss Charlotte at, I suspected, Olivia’s original direction. It had occurred to me to ask them to start calling me Mrs. Bliss, but I wasn’t sure I was ready for them to. And since I’d seen Olivia on the day of the funeral—for certainly it was Olivia—it also felt strangely presumptuous.
“Mr. Preston won’t be here for dinner tonight.”
“Yes, ma’am. He mentioned that.”