Читать книгу The Sweetest Hallelujah - Elaine Hussey, Elaine Hussey - Страница 9

THE EMPTY ROOM YAWNED before Cassie, a graveyard filled with ghosts. There, underneath the window facing the east, was the spot where Joe had put the crib.

“The first thing I want our baby to see is the morning sun.” He’d slipped his arms around Cassie and kissed her behind the ear where he knew it tickled and would make her giggle. “The second thing is my beautiful wife.”

She’d lost their first child that night, lying in their bed in a puddle of blood while Joe cried.

She’d been farther along with the second pregnancy, almost three months. Convinced they were having a boy, Joe had bought a tiny catcher’s mitt to put on the new walnut bookcase opposite the crib. Baseball, his first love. Then he’d added a harmonica. Music, his second love.

Afterward, they’d toasted each other with Pinot Grigio, sitting on the patio surrounded by the fragrance from Cassie’s Gertrude Jekyll roses. He pulled a blues harp from his pocket and serenaded her with the Jerome Kern ballad he’d sung for her at their wedding—“All the Things You Are.”

“You give me roses,” he said. “I give you music.”

The next day while he was on a road trip with his baseball team, she painted a pink rose on his B-flat blues harp. She never got a chance to give it to him. By the time he returned, she was in the hospital fighting a losing battle to save their baby.

When she got home, the harmonica with the rose was gone. She never knew what happened to it.

The baby crib, the bookshelves, the miniature baseball mitt and every other hopeful item they’d purchased were up in the attic, consigned to gather dust after her third failed pregnancy. Was that when her relationship with Joe started gathering dust?

Startled, Cassie wondered where in the world that thought had come from.

“Cassie? Did you hear me?” Fay Dean, who had dragged her straight from the soda fountain to the Empty Room, was standing with her hands on her hips and a take-no-prisoners look in her eyes.

“I was just remembering.”

“Stop looking back. We’re going to fill this room with everything you love. By the time we finish, it will be your favorite retreat.”

“I don’t know where to start.”

“I do. Follow me.” Fay Dean whizzed past, marched into the living room and grabbed a rocking chair that Mike had given them as a wedding gift. It had belonged to Joe’s mother.

“Wait a minute. I like the chair where it is.”

“You’re going to like it better where I put it.”

Fay Dean sailed out, a ship under full steam, leaving Cassie searching the bookshelves for the photographs she loved best: the one of Joe sitting in the boat on Moon Lake, a harmonica in his hand and his fishing pole in the water; Fay Dean and Cassie, arms linked, Fay Dean in her mortar board when she’d graduated from Vanderbilt School of Law and Cassie in her favorite pink hat, never mind that her mother always said pink clashed with her red hair; Cassie’s famous mother, Gwendolyn, and her beloved daddy, John, the year they’d gone to Paris to hear Gwendolyn sing at the opera. It had been the best year of Cassie’s childhood. Normally, she and her daddy were left behind while her mother trekked the world.

All these years later—her mother and daddy both long gone—she still remembered wondering why she wasn’t good enough to go with her mother. If she’d had children, Cassie would never have left them behind.

As she carried the photos into the Empty Room that no longer qualified for its title, she wondered what her child would have looked like. She’d wanted a girl with Joe’s easy smile.

“Cassie? What’s wrong?”

“She would have been ten years old.” The last baby Cassie had miscarried had been a little girl. “I wonder if she’d have been a tomboy or if she’d enjoy sitting on the bed with me reading poetry.”

“Don’t do this to yourself.”

“After I lost her, I dreamed she was standing in a field of Queen Anne’s Lace on Mike’s farm, and I was doing a watercolor of her.”

“Cassie, if you want to talk about this, I’ll listen, but I really think you ought to focus on something else. Maybe you ought to take up painting again.”

“Maybe Sean was right about making another appointment to see him.” Cassie looked at the pictures in her hand. “I don’t know where to put these.”

“Leave it to me.”

“Don’t I always, Napoleon the Second?”

“Yeah, well, without me, you’d never get across the Rubicon.”

“As I recall, neither did Napoleon.”

Fay Dean had already swept from the room, a woman on a mission.

Cassie set the rocking chair in motion, and Joe stared at her from the picture frame, his smile both comforting and heartbreaking. Had their marriage really been made of stars and fairy dust, or had goblins crept through the cracks?

“I’m going out,” Joe would say, and Cassie would look up from her supper, too weary thinking about the forever-closed nursery door to ask why.

He loves music, she’d tell herself after he was gone and she was trying to get up enough interest to brush the moo goo gai pan out of her teeth. All blues musicians are like that, she’d say after she finally found enough energy to crawl into bed. They go wherever they can find the gut-bucket blues, racial divides as wide as the ocean vanishing in the commonality of music. Joe had even gone to the Delta once, the cradle of the blues, seeking the old songs, the laments invented in cotton fields by a people with a hoe and no hope.

Later, after she’d climbed out of her depression enough to bury herself with work at The Bugle, she’d glance out the window, hoping to glimpse a gibbous moon, that lopsided miracle in the night sky that never failed to lift her spirits. She’d see a blanket of stars and suddenly feel as if somebody had thrown a sack over her head.

Fighting that same smothering sensation, Cassie jumped up and raced to the attic. She wouldn’t look at the baby stuff, didn’t trust herself. She wouldn’t even look at her dusty art-supply kit and her easel, but went straight to the corner where the dressmaker’s dummies stood. Grabbing one under each arm, she struggled across the floor. The fold-down ladder presented another problem. Even banishing ghosts of the past didn’t seem worth a broken neck.

“Cassie? What the hell?” Fay Dean stood at the bottom of the ladder, craning her neck.

“Thank God.” Cassie poked the male dummy down the staircase. “Here. Take Tarzan.”

“What are you doing up there?”

“I’m coming down with Jane.”

“That explains everything.”

Jane bumped down the stairs behind her, and Cassie hoped she didn’t lose body parts in the process. Finally, both of them stood at the bottom, Cassie triumphant and the dummy intact.

“Fay Dean, do you remember when I used to sew?”

“Back in the Dark Ages, I believe.”

“Keep it up, and I won’t be giving you a hand-tailored suit for Christmas.”

“If I recall, you don’t tailor.”

“What’s to keep me from learning?”

Fay Dean pumped her fist in the air. “Now, that’s what I’m talking about. Soon you’ll have so many projects, you won’t have time to think of what you’ve lost.”

They dragged the dummies into the room where the white wicker bookcase from Cassie’s sunroom now sat along the west wall holding her favorite photographs. She placed Tarzan in the rocking chair, and Fay Dean stood Jane by the bookcase.

“They look natural, don’t they?” Fay Dean said.

“They look naked.” Cassie went to the hall closet and came back with one of her gardening hats for Jane and one of Joe’s baseball caps for Tarzan. Her husband’s scent clung to the hat, and he whispered through her mind like a song with lyrics she was struggling to remember.

“Cassie? What is it?”

“Nothing. I was trying to figure out how to get the sewing machine down from the attic.”

“Daddy will do it,” Fay Dean said. “Let’s have something to drink. A celebration.”

They kicked off their shoes, linked arms and went into the kitchen where the moon was shining through the window and anything at all could happen.

Suddenly they heard a knocking at the back door.

“Anybody home?” It was Ben, carrying a bottle of Pinot Grigio. “I saw Fay Dean’s car in your driveway and thought we might all enjoy a drink.”

The bottle in Ben’s hand reminded Cassie of Joe, of how they’d celebrated every major milestone with that same type of wine, and how, in a heartbeat, events you think of as triumphant can turn into regret that follows you everywhere, no matter how you try to hide.

Cassie took down three glasses instead of two. They drank their wine while Fay Dean regaled them with stories from the courtroom and Ben chatted about doings at The Bugle. If anybody noticed how quiet Cassie was, they didn’t say.

Afterward, Ben toted the heavy cabinet-style sewing machine from the attic and moved it around the room four times before Fay Dean was satisfied that it was just right.

When they both left, Cassie sat in the rocking chair staring at the sewing machine. Would her little lost girl have loved pink ruffles on her dresses or yellow ribbon?