4
IT WAS A week of preparations and so much excitement at school that it was almost impossible to concentrate on schoolwork. I was on the phone almost every night with one of my girlfriends whose envy practically dripped through the receiver. I tried to remain modest about all the attention I was getting, but it wasn’t easy to control my own enthusiasm. Our lunch table remained confined to Ryder, Paul, Alison, and me the whole week, but our friends hovered around us. Some, like the girls on Ryder’s prom committee, interrupted every day to ask a question that had an obvious answer. Every girl in the school who had not yet been asked searched the remaining uncommitted boys in the senior class, practically begging for an invitation. A few actually initiated the invitations themselves.
All week, I moved through the hallways like a queen bee surrounded by drones buzzing with questions about my clothes, my hair. Many made comments about other girls who were going, to provide me with information about their preparations, as if I was in some grand competition. It was all quite new for me. In science class, Mr. Malamud’s description of how a caterpillar morphs into a butterfly had an unexpected meaning. It was suddenly a way to view myself and what was happening to me. When he said the caterpillar first digests itself, but certain groups of cells survive to turn it into the beautiful butterfly, I thought maybe I was doing that.
To fully grasp the responsibility of becoming a young lady, the princess all of us young ladies thought we were becoming, I had to put away childish things, digest them. Suddenly, being loud and giggling over silly comments and clownish, immature actions had to stop. I became more aware of how I dressed every day and what I said to anyone. I wanted to be more demure, move more gracefully, and care about my posture. I studied Alison continuously, trying to capture that same soft smile, that look in her eyes that, without being arrogant, clearly said, What you’re complaining about or wanting to do is childish.
By midweek, I thought I had aged a decade more than my juvenile, self-indulgent classmates. Some of the more jealous ones were already whispering behind my back, conspiring to have me clearly labeled snobby. How ironic, I thought. It wasn’t long ago that my being what Bea Davenport practically shouted in the halls of Wyndemere, an illegitimate child, had me traveling on a level quite a bit below most of my classmates. Maybe I was a real Cinderella after all.
This infatuation with a newer, more mature self-image reached a climax on Thursday, when I nearly failed a math test. Mr. Wasserman, my teacher, scowled at my paper when he handed it to me.
“You know this material, Fern,” he said. “These are careless errors.”
“I’m sorry.”
I was sure he knew the reason for my inattentiveness. Students weren’t the only ones who gossiped about their activities in our relatively small school.
He shook his head. “Compartmentalize,” he prescribed. “When you’re in my classroom, you’re nowhere else.”
“Okay,” I said. He was one teacher I didn’t want to disappoint.
Pamela Sommes overheard him and had a broad smile on her envious round face. If she were the last girl on earth, the last boy would force himself to turn asexual. It wasn’t only my thought, either, but that didn’t lessen my embarrassment and regret. The truth was that I was nearly in tears by the time the bell rang. I didn’t know how many times during classes I had doodled images of myself in my new dress and failed to listen.
After school on Monday, Mr. Stark had driven my mother and me to Mrs. Levine’s home. She was an elderly lady who operated a tailor shop out of her house, actually not too far from where Alison’s family lived. Ten years ago, my mother had a box of clothes for me that needed some tailoring, and she had brought me to Mrs. Levine’s shop. Apparently, from what I could remember, the clothes were of some high quality and worth adjusting and fitting for me. When I recalled that, I wondered if they could have been something else discovered in the attic. Perhaps my mother had been told where to look for them. I couldn’t imagine her simply going up there to forage about with clothes for me in mind.
On the way to Mrs. Levine’s this time, I asked her about it and quickly saw from the way Mr. Stark looked at her that the answer was something neither cared to explain. That only sharpened my curiosity.
“Why are you thinking about that now?” my mother asked, sounding suspicious.
“I don’t know. It just came to me. Whose clothes were they? Why is it such a secret, anyway? Whose hand-me-downs were they?”
“They were all like new, Fern,” my mother said. “I wouldn’t call them hand-me-downs.”
“Yes, I remember that. I never really thought of them as used clothes, but whose were they? Why is it such a secret?” I cried again, exasperated.
“You might as well tell her,” Mr. Stark said. “She’s old enough now and knows how to keep things to herself.”
I looked at my mother with anticipation.
“Dr. Davenport had a younger sister,” my mother said softly. “She died when she was about six. He was about nine at the time.”
“What? I never heard any mention of her. I never saw a picture of her. I don’t understand. How did she die?”
“She had a malfunctioning heart valve. She died in her sleep one night. Elizabeth Davenport’s way of handling her sorrow was to deny that her daughter had ever existed. She closed up her room, which is still closed today, and got rid of anything and everything that belonged to the child. Except some of the clothes that for some reason were stored in the attic. I think Simon Davenport insisted on holding on to something.”
“What was her name?”
“Holly,” my mother said. “I believe it was Simon Davenport’s grandmother’s name.”
I sat back, shocked. How could someone’s, a little girl’s, existence be completely erased? What a horrible thing. I sat up quickly.
“Where was she buried? There was a grave for her, right? Does the doctor visit it? Has he brought Ryder there?”
“Oh, Fern, why bring all this up now?” my mother moaned. “It was a horrible tragedy for the Davenports. Everyone has his or her own way of dealing with such things. My own father was like that. If something annoyed or displeased him, he simply denied it existed.”
“Like you?”
“Exactly.”
“But where is Holly buried?”
“She wasn’t buried, Fern. She was cremated. I think her remains are in some vault. Can we stop talking about this?” my mother pleaded.
Mr. Stark nodded. “You should listen to your mother,” he said.
“But Dr. Davenport gave you those clothes for me?”
“Yes,” she said.
I thought about it some more. “I bet that was why he wanted to be a cardiac surgeon. I bet every time he helps someone, he brings his sister back to life.”
My mother turned sharply and looked at me, surprised at my quick analysis.
“Right?” I asked.
“Maybe,” she said.
“Does Ryder know this? He’s never mentioned it.”
“I don’t think so, Fern. Don’t you be the one to mention it to him, either,” she warned.
“What about Bea Davenport?”
“I don’t know who knows what now, Fern. If I had to venture a guess, I’d say she doesn’t know and wouldn’t care about it anyway.”
“Does Mrs. Marlene know?”
“Oh, Fern, please.”
A heavy silence fell over the three of us for a few moments.
“How strange all this is,” I thought aloud when I realized something else. “I’m going to wear Dr. Davenport’s first wife’s dress to the prom, and when I was little, I wore his sister’s clothes. And it all came from the attic. Secrets. More secrets,” I muttered.
My mother bit down on her lower lip and turned away.
Later, I tried to concentrate on what we were doing at Mrs. Levine’s, but it was difficult to forget what my mother had told me. It was actually more of the reason I was so distracted at school, but I couldn’t mention it, of course. I began to rake through all my childhood memories, especially the ones that involved Ryder, but I could think of nothing, not a reference, and not anything in the house that suggested Dr. Davenport once had a younger sister.
Mrs. Levine raved about Ryder’s mother’s dress and how beautiful I was going to look in it when she was finished with the adjustments. Every time she referred to how she remembered me as a little girl, I thought about Holly Davenport. It gave me an eerie feeling to think that perhaps all those times when I was little and felt a shadowy presence moving about me in the house, I was sensing Holly’s spirit.
That following day at lunch, Ryder had noticed something different about me. Despite Bea Davenport’s efforts to build a chasm between Ryder, Sam, and myself, Ryder and I were often sensitive to each other’s feelings. Just like I could look at him and read that he was upset about something, he could look at and read me.
“Are you feeling all right?” he asked me when the bell rang ending the lunch hour and we had started out.
“I’m fine,” I said.
He thought for a moment and must have concluded that I was simply very nervous about attending the prom. He knew, of course, that this was my first formal date, too. Like everyone else, I had met boys at the mall or at sporting events, but none of those budding little romances ever flowered. I had no expectation of developing a romance with Paul, either.
Ryder had another suspicion about my subdued manner. “Bea is not going to cause us any more trouble,” he promised as we walked in the hallway. Alison caught up. “My father and she had another argument. He didn’t think she should have prevented Sam from going into the attic with us.”
“My mother says she scowls at her more, but she hasn’t said anything or increased her complaining. She hasn’t reduced it, either,” I added, and he laughed.
“Paul will come to Wyndemere first on Saturday and pick you and me up, and then we’ll go to Alison’s house to get her,” Ryder said. He thought a moment and added, “I want you to come into the main house when you’re ready. We’re not having Paul go around to the servants’ entrance to pick you up. I’ll tell you exactly when Paul’s arriving.”
“Are you sure?”
“This is not a delivery,” he replied, his eyes sharp and determined.
“Okay,” I said.
“Well, I don’t think Bea Davenport can make a fuss over that,” my mother said that afternoon when I told her what Ryder wanted me to do. “But I’ve often been wrong about how picayune that woman can be. She’d make a good drill sergeant for someone’s army.”
The next day, Ryder laughed when I told him what my mother had said.
“I keep her out of my room,” he bragged. “And lock my personal things in a trunk in the closet just so she can’t get her snoopy nose into it.”
“Everything is set at the beauty salon for Saturday,” Alison piped up. I could see that she didn’t want to hear anything more about Bea Davenport. I was sure Ryder and she had exhausted the subject between the day in the attic and now.
I had to get myself more into all this, I thought. I had to do what Mr. Wasserman told me to do in class, compartmentalize and shove all the static out of my mind. I was going with my mother after school to do a final fitting of the dress at Mrs. Levine’s on Thursday. Both Alison and Ryder knew.
“Can’t wait to see you in it,” Alison said dryly. I sensed she didn’t really think it would look good on me.
“Me, neither,” Ryder added as we separated for our classes. The look on his face gave me a chill. Ordinarily, I would have been happy to hear him say such a thing, but for some reason, I felt I was facing an unexpected challenge. It was as if he really expected I would look as beautiful in the dress as his mother had, that I was somehow worthy of the dress.
But what if I didn’t look anywhere nearly as attractive in it? What if I looked silly in it or something? Maybe he should have offered the dress to Alison instead of me. Why didn’t he if it was so special to him? Surely, he thought Alison was very beautiful. She was. Everyone said so. Was it that he wouldn’t want her to wear a hand-me-down? Did he see my mother and me the way Bea wanted him to see us, as the poor servants living in the rear of Wyndemere? Was he hoping that I, like some mythical Cinderella, would, when I put on the dress, magically rise out of the ordinary, if only for one night?
And as soon as prom night was over and I took off the dress, would I return to that second-class person Bea Davenport insisted my mother and I were? I was afraid of that moment when the prom and all that followed had become a memory. I’d hang up the dress, put away the shoes, and return to childish fantasies and, more important, perhaps, my place in Wyndemere, even my place in my school.
Ryder didn’t even mention my riding to or from school in the limousine again. I thought that prohibition remained to placate Bea Davenport and give her some small victory. After all, from what Ryder was telling me, Dr. Davenport was criticizing her not for how she had treated me but for how she had treated Sam. His usual aloofness, especially when it came to me, would continue except for one small but surprising moment.
Ryder came to see me during dinner Friday. My mother and I were in the kitchen. He knocked and entered.
“Sorry to bother you, Miss Corey,” he told my mother.
As always, when she saw Ryder, especially without his father or Bea present, her face lit up. She was as excited as she would be to see and speak to her own child. No matter what he did when he was younger, and even now, she was always one of the first to defend him, especially in front of the other servants. Of course, it was difficult to defend him when he was insolent to his stepmother in front of a maid or Mrs. Marlene, but rather than criticize him, my mother would remain silent. Her look was enough. Everyone understood. The only face that truly smiled at Bea Davenport in Wyndemere was the face Bea saw in the mirror.
“It’s all right, Ryder. We’re just having a quick nibble. Fern is too nervous to eat, and she makes me too nervous to eat as well,” she added.
Ryder looked at me and smiled. “I’ll be sure she’s fed well at the prom and after,” he promised. “I just wanted to stop in to tell Fern that my father has asked for her to stop by his office just before Paul arrives. He’d like to see her in the dress, so she should plan accordingly.”
My mother froze with the bowl of salad in her hands. “Oh?” she said. She looked at me. “That’s very nice, right, Fern?”
For a moment, I couldn’t speak. It was one thing for Ryder to see me in the dress and say something cute or funny or even very nice, but Dr. Davenport would be looking at me and thinking of his first wife. If he thought I did his wife’s memory a disservice, he might just nod and turn away. It would be devastating, right before I was going to leave for the prom. How would the rest of the night feel? My depression would drag everyone down, especially ruining Alison’s night, and she would never let me forget it.
“Yes. Very nice,” I managed to say.
I should have had more confidence, I know. Both my mother and I loved the way Mrs. Levine had adjusted and fitted the dress to me. She had insisted on taking a picture of me for her shop wall. For her, it was a work of art. My mother was staring at me in a way I had not seen her stare.
“What?” I asked her, afraid she thought wearing Samantha Davenport’s dress was a mistake after all.
She shook her head. My heart began to sink. How would I get a nice dress now and the shoes to match?
But then she smiled. “I’m thinking of how sad and unfortunate it was for my father never to have set eyes on you. You resemble his mother in so many ways. She was a very beautiful woman.”
“And so are you, Emma,” Mrs. Levine said. “I’m not surprised at how Fern’s turned out. The apple doesn’t fall far from the tree.”
“Unless the tree’s at the top of a hill. That’s what my father would say when explaining me to his friends.”
“Well, he’d be wrong,” Mrs. Levine insisted.
To have such a wonderful reaction from Mrs. Levine and my mother was great, but it wasn’t the same thing as having Dr. Davenport consider me.
“I’ll stop in my father’s office with you,” Ryder said now. He knew I was nervous and even a little frightened about it. “He likes to check how I look, too. I don’t think he’ll carry on about my hair. He’s given up on that. Okay?”
He looked at my mother.
“She’ll have a great time. I promise,” he told her. “And I’ll look after her.”
“That’s good,” my mother said. “Thank you, Ryder.”
“See you soon,” Ryder told me, and left.
I turned to my mother. “Now I wish we had bought me my own dress,” I said.
“Oh, don’t be foolish, girl. That dress cost ten times what we would have spent, and you look beautiful in it. Dr. Davenport will be proud of how you wear it. It will do his wife’s memory justice. I remember her well, and you look just as good in it, if not better. And that’s that,” she said.
Maybe she was right. Maybe I was being unnecessarily nervous and looking for excuses for myself. After all, I was going to be double-dating with Alison. Her beauty would overshadow me—anyone—anyway. Why wasn’t I more worried about that?
“Mr. Stark will be by to take you to the beauty parlor tomorrow,” my mother said. “I won’t be going along, you know. I have work to do here.”
“Did you really like the style I chose?”
I had shown her the half dozen pictures Alison had given me.
“Certainly did.” She paused to think. “I haven’t been to a real beauty salon since I worked in New York.”
“Whose fault is that?” I asked. For as long as I could remember, Mrs. Marlene cut her hair and she cut Mrs. Marlene’s. She had always cut mine. She told me her father wouldn’t even permit her mother to spend money on a beauty salon. Her mother, her sister, and she had to learn how to cut and trim their own and took turns doing it for each other.
She pulled her shoulders up. “Ain’t you the smarty-pants now?” she said, half-kidding. She glanced at her reflection in the one kitchen window we had, which was over the sink, and fluffed her hair. “I might just make my own appointment. George saw a few nasty little gray strands sneaking in.”
“He told you that? Cheeky,” I said.
She laughed. “George Stark and I have long since stifled any pretense between us.”
“Did you know his wife well?” I asked, my old suspicions reviving.
“Not well, no,” she said. “She contracted a vicious cancer, and from the time she was diagnosed to the day she passed, it was barely four months. Very difficult time for Mr. Stark,” she added. “You weren’t born yet, but I had Ryder to care for, so there was just so much I could do to help. His way of dealing with it was to work harder here,” she added. “And Cathy was a big help to him, too. But let’s not talk about sad things now. You have a wonderful event ahead of you.”
She smiled.
“You know, the word prom can be different in England. There, the Proms are daily orchestral classical music concerts. I went to one in the Royal Albert Hall when I was a few years younger than you. I loved all music. That was very exciting for me, but not like the excitement you’re having at your first prom.”
“You must have had some formal dates before you left England,” I said. I was determined to get her to tell me more intimate things about her life.
She nodded and sat at the table. “There was a young man who haunted my front door. He was wary of my father, who looked at every possible beau I might have as if he was a potential rapist. But this young man was undaunted.”
“What was his name?”
“Nigel. Nigel Douglas. Nigel Ashley Douglas, to be exact. His father owned a pharmacy, and he worked there until he went to college. He went to Oxford for pharmacology. I’m sure he took over his father’s pharmacy.”
“You don’t know?”
“No. When I left, as I told you, only my sister stayed in touch with me, and secretly, of course. She could whisper news about me to my mother whenever my father wasn’t around.”
“Did she ever come to America to visit?”
“No. My sister was doomed to be a spinster. She was a slave to my parents. I shouldn’t say ‘slave’; I should say ‘dedicated.’ I was more selfish.”
“And now?”
“And now she takes care of my mother, who really needs to be in a home.”
“Don’t you ever want to go see her?”
“She suffers from serious dementia. She wouldn’t know I was there, Fern. It’s better that if she remembers anything, she remembers me before I left. Oh,” she said, snapping out of her reverie quickly. “There you go again, getting me to talk about the saddest things. Live for today, not yesterday, Fern. That’s what I do now. You’re what matters and what will matter, and that’s that.”
After dinner, I put on my prom dress again and stood before the full-length mirror my mother had given me long ago. I imagined Ryder standing beside me in his tuxedo, looking smart and handsome. I had seen him wearing it and knew how distinguished he could look, even with his rebellious hairstyle.
When I closed my eyes, I imagined dancing with him, not Paul. How hard that was going to be, and how foolish I might look in Paul’s arms, I thought.
My mother knocked and peeked in. “Well, this is truly a dress rehearsal,” she said. I must have looked embarrassed. “That’s all right, Fern. I’d be doing the same thing. Anyway, I just wanted to let you know that I was going to O’Heany’s tavern for a little while with Mr. Stark.”
“You are?”
“Well, I should. Today’s his birthday,” she revealed. “He wouldn’t let me or Mrs. Marlene make him a cake. He’s really a shy man.”
“Wish him happy birthday for me. I would have tried to get him something if I had remembered.” If I hadn’t been concentrating so much on myself this whole week, I would have, I thought.
“Oh, I got him something from us, his favorite aftershave lotion. Actually, I got him to make it his favorite, English Leather.”
“Did your father wear that?”
“No,” she said. She paused, started to close the door, and stopped. “It was something Nigel wore,” she said, and closed the door.
I stood there for a moment staring at the closed door. What if she lied to me? What if Nigel Ashley Douglas did follow her to America, followed her here?
What if he was my real father?
I took off my prom dress slowly and then looked at myself in the mirror. Was it terribly wrong, narcissistic, to gaze at yourself, delighted at how your figure was forming, perhaps more than simply nicely? My breasts were round and firm and felt fuller just these past few weeks. I was developing what my mother called “an hourglass figure.”
Preparing for bed now, I undid my bra and turned to look at my side profile when I pulled my shoulders back. I imagined Ryder opening my door the way he once had and bursting in on me again, only this time, he would see me half-naked. He wouldn’t speak; he wouldn’t even swallow. He’d barely breathe. And instead of rushing to cover myself, I would turn slowly to face him fully.
The images sent wave after wave of erotic feelings up my legs to the insides of my thighs. When I gazed at myself in the mirror, I saw how flushed I’d become. Was this the way my mother was a little over sixteen years ago? Whoever had come upon her when she was undressed would have had every iota of self-control diminished.
They had embraced each other under waves of passion as strong as an undertow at sea. Resistance was futile, really unwanted. There were no thoughts about tomorrow, only thoughts about the moment. My lips were salty with the images, my father’s strong body pressed gently against her softness. What words did he whisper, what did she whisper? Were there any promises? Did either offer a wait or a no?
Most of, if not almost all, my friends did not obsess about the sexual moments that resulted in their conception. From the way they spoke, I sensed a resistance against thinking of their parents in that way. For me, because of how forbidden it must have been and still was, there had to be an undeniable and persistent fascination.
Would I ever feel sexual and not think of it? At night, when I closed my eyes and had my sexual fantasies, I often envisioned my mother much younger and as defiant as she had been when she left England against her father’s wishes. Never once, perhaps because the possibilities weren’t yet there, did I sense her concern that I might have a moment of sexual surrender and weakness like she had.
But surely it would begin to have a seat at the table now. Her questions about my dates and places I wanted to go would be sharper, closer. She would wonder if she indeed saw too much of herself in me. Yes, there was that apple that didn’t fall far from the tree. Was I wiser, stronger, and more alert to the dangers because of what she had done and who I was?
I was confident now that she would talk more about herself. I had reached a place where she was unafraid of damaging childhood innocence. We were growing closer. A part of me welcomed it, but a part of me regretted losing the comfort of make-believe.
I lay back on my bed, naked now, and kept my hands at my sides. There was such a strong urge coming from every erotic place, calling for my touch. Conquer it first in yourself, I thought, and it might be easier to conquer it when it comes with someone you like, someone you want very much to touch you and make you cry with delight and wonderful fear simultaneously.
I closed my eyes and thought of other things. Minutes passed. I heard the sounds in the house and my own heart thumping. I crawled beneath my cover and turned off my light. I was poised, waiting for the sun to give birth to tomorrow. The ghost of Dr. Davenport’s first wife and the ghost of his sister, Holly, were making their way through the walls of Wyndemere to wait with him in his office, wait for me to come walking through that door.
I must not disappoint them.
That was how I began my prayers. I fell asleep listening to the whispers promising me that I would not disappoint anyone, especially not Ryder.
Were they the whispers of the ghosts of Wyndemere, or were they my own?