Here’s something that may shock you: my brother Samuel has arrived from England, dead broke and desperate, and I’ve given him a job. I hope you don’t mind, although I suppose there’s no reason you should, other than the fact that you never had a high opinion of him exactly. But there wasn’t much left after my parents died, you see; nearly everything was sold off to pay the debts and the death taxes—including, as you know, the poor old house itself—and he and my sister have run out of what little remained. He has resigned his commission, and there are no honest jobs to be had at the moment, with so many soldiers out of work. So he’s come here—buried his pride, you might say, as a last resort—and I suppose I haven’t the heart to refuse my own brother.
Not that I have much to give him, at present. I have taken out a massive mortgage on the property in order to fund the building of the new steamships—nearly complete—and the repair of the orchards and the house. But the fact is, I could use the help of someone whom I—well, if not trust utterly, at least understand. Left to myself, you know, I should much rather spend my time mucking about on the plantation, while Samuel is, by nature, better suited to the civilized warfare of the business interests in Cocoa. And since I can’t be in two places at once, I imagine this arrangement will make the best of both of us: he managing the day-to-day affairs of the hotel and the shipping company, I turning my orchards into a thriving vale once more, and neither of us having to do more than is absolutely necessary with the other.
Well, I shan’t bore you with any more business details. I daresay that’s the last thing you’re interested in. In any case, there’s a luminous, golden-pink dawn dreaming outside my bedroom window, and the haze is rising slowly above the blossoming trees, and I would really rather slumber on and think of you than do anything else at all.
But that would accomplish nothing, would it? So instead I shall finish this letter, rise from the armchair, and don my trousers and work boots. I shall head out into that fragrant dawn and see to my trees and garden, and when I return I shall bunker down in my study and attend to business over a pot of fresh coffee. Try to make these sums in my account books stretch out a little longer. Just a bit longer, and then in another year, God willing, I can approach my wife, hat in hand, heart in throat, and explain everything. Ask her to join me in this new home I am building around me.
Until then, I remain your own
S.F.
Chapter 20
Maitland Plantation, Florida, July 1922
Sometime in the night, I open my eyes to the strange perspective of the bedroom floor, illuminated rather luridly by the glow of the kerosene lamp above my head. I suppose I’ve fallen asleep, though I can’t imagine how. My cheek sticks to the fibers of the rug. My hand throbs. Damned scorching thirst fills my throat. And my head! My God, how it hurts. Not a headache as you ordinarily experience them, but a kind of unbearable, itching, spider-crawling pressure, as if my brain is going to burst from my skull.
I must have aspirin.
There’s no question of standing, let alone walking. As I detach my face from the rug and place my left palm against the floor to hoist my torso a few inches upward, into a world that swings violently back and forth, I think I’ve never tried so hard to accomplish anything else in my life. Even giving birth to Evelyn, for which at least God and nature granted me a certain reservoir of strength. Here, I have nothing. I have only will. Just need.
Because of the injury to my hand, I crawl across the floor on my knees and my elbows. I cross the edge of the rug, and now the bare wooden floorboards grind against my bones. Why is the bedroom so large? It’s like scaling a continent. I pass the open French window, and a draft of damp air engulfs me, cooler than you might expect on a July night in Florida. I think—trying to distract myself—maybe it’s another thunderstorm, about to pull across the night sky, and just as this thought takes its fuzzy shape in my mind, a distant groan troubles the atmosphere. I would say ominous, but the thunderstorms come so regularly here, drenching us daily, rattling the roof tiles and coursing down the drainpipes, bathing the orchards and the turf until the sun bursts out again and all that water turns to steam—as I say, the thunderstorms are such frequent visitors, they’re like old friends. Not ominous at all. I imagine, as I reach the threshold of the bathroom, how lovely it would feel to dance in the rain at midnight.
The mere act of dragging myself across the bedroom floor seems—paradoxically, maybe—to have restored a little life to my limbs. I gaze up at the elegant basin, and the medicine cabinet above it, and I might just manage it. If I brace my good left hand on the marble and gather my feet underneath me. If I use my legs to lever myself upward, and my arm for balance, and I set my teeth against the myriad agonies blooming inside me. Outside the bathroom window, the thunder rumbles again, imminent now.
I have always considered myself a woman of tidy habits. Everything in its place, you know, and even though I never flinched at the prospect of those muddy battlefields, I always cleaned myself afterward, to a meticulous standard, before I allowed myself to collapse in bed. I don’t know why. I wasn’t an especially tidy child. I had such a multitude of toys when I was young, so many dresses and hair ribbons and God knows what else, I could strew them around me and not care what became of any particular item. And then we moved to New York, and my earthly possessions could—and did—fit into a single satchel, and suddenly the disposition of those possessions actually mattered. The orderly arrangement of my hair mattered. The clean symmetry of my face and hands mattered. A speck of dirt on the hem of my dress became a subject of immediate anxiety. A scuff on my shoe sent me into a panic.
And now. Just look at me in the mirror.
My face, smeared with blood. My nightgown, stained. My right hand crusted and clotted and swollen. My hair matted and limp. Wan, hollow-eyed, dull, blurry. I turn on the tap. Hot and cold running water, terribly luxurious. I must clean myself, of course. Clean up this terrible mess I’ve made of myself.
But first. Aspirin.
Tap off.
The fingers of my right hand have lost all strength. Shaking and vulnerable. A kind of panic fills me as I fumble and fumble with the bottle, and then I turn it into my left hand and use my teeth to screw open the lid and it pops off, satisfying sound, and I pour one tablet—just one!—onto the marble edge of the basin, and my fingers are shaking so hard, my muscles are trembling so violently, that when I try to grasp that darling, delicious tablet it careens down the side of the basin and disappears into the drain.
(A brief double flash outside the window. A quiet crash of thunder deepens into a rumble.)
Calm down now. (The breath saws along my throat.) Calm down. Close your eyes. You can do this.
I can do this.
All I need is an aspirin. Just one little aspirin and I can clean my face and hands and change my nightgown, I can find that perfect tranquillity of mind and become myself again. Virginia. Whoever that is. Clear everything away.