It is my betrothal day. Me, Olivia. I can hardly believe it.
My father has not spoken to me for four days, and my mother won’t stop talking. I steal a glance at her as she tries to flirt with the attractive dark-eyed boy sitting across from us who looks like he has been kept in a broom closet his entire life, and I want to beg her to be quiet because she sounds like a fool. Look at the boy, Michael Searle Bliss: Did you ever see a boy who was so polite and neat? He’s kind to my mother, but I wonder if he isn’t patronizing her. Being patronized is the thing she likes best, aside from a coconut blancmange. It makes me want to scream, but she has made her way in the world by pretending to let others advise her while making sure that she gets exactly what she wants. What she wants now is for me to be married and away from the house.
My father and his anger simmer beside me. His fingers grip the knees of his brown wool pants so tightly that his knuckles are white. The lawyer—who, like the tall ugly man with moles on his face and neck, arrived wearing an old-fashioned Homburg even though it’s nearly eighty degrees outside—keeps trying to engage him in conversation from where he stands behind Michael Searle’s chair. You would think by now that the man would understand that my mother is in charge in this matter.
I’ve never been alone with Michael Searle Bliss, who is always called by both his first and middle names. He has written me letters—long, rather interesting letters telling me about Virginia and the town of Old Gate, where he lives with his mother, Lucy. Although he is only a year younger than I, the letters are as enthusiastic as if they’d been written by a child. When these letters come, my mother reads them first, but I do not care just as I don’t care whom I marry anymore.
There is money enough for me to live on when my parents are dead, but my mother is determined that I should marry. Although I won’t complain, as it is the only way I won’t have to listen to her constant harping about my stubbornness, my posture, my table manners, anymore. I have only the vaguest idea of how she settled on Michael Searle. It had something to do with our mothers being very distant cousins. Why this rich boy would have any interest in a scarred girl who cares more about accounting for her father’s acreage and livestock than throwing parties or running a house, I’m sure I don’t know.
But it is why my father is angry. He imagined I would act as the son he never had, taking over the management of his land when he got too old. My father is an abrasive man. He alienated the only other suitor I ever had, calling his Irish family “mackerel-eating papists” during a dinner at which he drank too much wine. Though I suspected he wasn’t really as drunk as he pretended. If he were kinder, and my mother less ambitious, I might have stayed with them forever.
I know I should listen to what they’re saying. I hear my name, though no one talks to me directly. But the room is hot and I dislike the way the tall, ugly man stares at a point just above my head, as though I am invisible.
There are parties to celebrate our upcoming wedding. More of them are in Raleigh than in Virginia because Michael’s mother is still in mourning and is, anyway, rather reclusive. Michael Searle and I smile dimly through them while my mother comments behind her hand about the quality of the wine being served. Many people’s stockpiles put by before the Volstead Act are running low, and so the quality is uneven. She embarrasses me, and I try to keep her away from Michael Searle. I’ve become protective of him, somehow, as though he were a younger brother rather than my betrothed. The parties are a torment. He is a dreadful dancer, and so we sit watching the others. He urges me on, encouraging me to dance with the other young men who politely ask, but I become sad for him when I see him sitting, alone, wearing his mourning armband and smoking cigarette after cigarette. I wonder that he doesn’t have any friends. Of course, so many of the young men our age went off to war and died. Perhaps his friends have all died. I do not ask.
At the parties, regardless of the quality of the wine (or gin or bourbon), everyone drinks heavily. Nothing so coarse as bathtub gin—though I have been to hidden roadside taverns, much to the chagrin of my father and the shame of my mother. Michael Searle and I have a fondness for champagne. I think, sometimes, that I would like to drink champagne until I drown in it.