Bed & Breakfast Read online

  The photo was in black and white but she always saw Bear’s chocolate eyes and hair, the gold buttons on his uniform, her suit—“dusty rose” the saleswoman had called it and she’d loved the name. It had been an expensive, well-tailored suit and the cream hat and gloves and her purple-throated corsage had complemented it nicely. But it wasn’t a wedding gown. It would have taken only another few weeks of preparation to have a real wedding. Why had she crumbled under Bear’s insistence and forgone all the pomp and celebration she’d dreamt about? Because, at the time, as Mawmaw had said, she would have walked off a cliff if Bear had told her to. Her fault, not his. “We create our own reality,” her daughter, Evie, was always saying. “We always get what we secretly want.” But that couldn’t possibly be true. She had never gotten anything she’d wanted except this house, and she’d had to drive the final wedge between her and Bear and threaten divorce to get it.

  The other photo, taken some ten years later, was a typical studio portrait of a typical (though certainly better looking than average) well-bred, well-fed, well-groomed American family, circa 1950s, when being typical was a badge of honor. At one time the photo had filled her with pride, but over the years she’d come to see it differently. In it, she and Bear, his uniform now decorated with medals, were seated with Cam and Lila between them. Evie, who was only a few weeks old, was held in her lap. Bear was, if possible, even more handsome than he’d been in their wedding photo, but he looked a bit too rigid. Playing Daddy had never been an easy role for him and he’d had a terrible hangover the morning the photo had been taken. When she looked closely she could see the nick on his left cheek and remembered rushing around the house to find his styptic pencil. But that had been back in the days when two-fisted men had been expected to tie one on at weekend parties, when booze had increased rather than diminished his sexual prowess, when she’d denied that he had a problem.

  She was still in maternity clothes (that teal suit with the bow at the neck, which she’d come to hate). Her face was fuller and her hair was gathered into a chignon, because in those days there were definite styles that corresponded to each phase of a woman’s life and a young matron didn’t go around looking like a teenager. Her smile had lost the hint of seductiveness it had shown in her wedding portrait but was still trusting and open. You didn’t see such innocent expressions anymore, not even in very young girls, but back then she’d still believed everything her husband, her government, and the newspapers had told her. And if she’d had any doubts, she’d hidden them, because that was her duty as a military wife.

  She hadn’t planned on being a military wife. When they’d married during the war it had been impossible to plan anything. She’d just prayed that he would come back alive and whole, and when he did, he’d probably go to college on the G.I. Bill. But by the time the war had ended he wasn’t Ted Tatternall anymore, he was what his admiring buddies had christened him: he was “Bear,” a fearsome career warrior. And she’d known, with a jealousy she hadn’t been able to admit, that the military had become not just his profession, but wife and mistress to him as well. Asking him to take an office job or sit in a classroom would have been like asking Tarzan to put on a three-piece suit. So she’d accepted his decision, as a loving wife was supposed to do. Bear was climbing the promotional ladder and writing a book about his experiences in the Pacific. When the book was published (and she’d never doubted that it would be), she would get the home she’d always wanted. In the meantime she’d be stoic about her homesickness and overcome her panic at being constantly uprooted and having to make a nest in strange towns, even in foreign countries.

  During the long periods when Bear was away she was expected to, as he put it, “hold the fort.” Her appearance and behavior, and even that of her children, would be written up in Bear’s periodic fitness reports. Any misstep could damage his chances of promotion (because, the reasoning went, if a man couldn’t keep his family in line, how could he be fit to command men?). She’d studied the wives’ reference manual. The rigid and detailed instructions made her want to laugh (“answer the phone in a low, well-modulated voice.... Place an ashtray at the top of each plate to the left of the water glass, and in it put two or three cigarettes and a book of matches.... When making a social call at a commanding officer’s house never stay more than twenty minutes....”), but she kept the joke to herself. Any hint that she didn’t take all the conventions seriously might put Bear at risk. So she joined the appropriate organizations, spearheaded fund-raisers and welcoming committees, kept herself, her children, and her home ever-ready for white-glove inspection. When Bear returned, they’d joke about his giving her an A on her periodic evaluation. He rewarded her with gifts from wherever he’d been deployed, but her real reward came after the girls had shown him their report cards, new teeth, drawings, and merit badges, when he’d give her his thousand-watt smile and say, “Dammit, call that babysitter. I want to paint the town with my best girl.”

  And he could paint the town as no one else could. From the best hotels and nightclubs to roadside juke joints, if there was a place to laugh and cut loose, drink and dance, Bear Tatternall could find it. He could coax the best table out of a snooty maitre d’, get a bartender in a country tavern to reach under the counter for the white lightnin’ on a Sunday, set an entire table laughing at the officers’ club. And dance! In the slow numbers he led with a light but masterful touch, and when he jitterbugged he had such swivel-hipped, athletic vitality that couples would stop and applaud. He was, quite literally, the life of every party. But when he gave her the look they called “the eye-melt” and touched her leg under the table, she couldn’t reach for her coat fast enough.

  Their lovemaking had all the thrill and excitement of the first times, without her initial shyness and fumbling. What joy it was to have him back! To have what she’d remembered, thought about, longed for. In the mornings, she’d wake to the sound of the kids stirring, say “Rest,” pull on her robe and go into the kitchen. She’d be turning the bacon or brewing coffee and he’d saunter out, showered and shaved, looking none the worse for wear, to tell the girls that he expected them to be especially dutiful while he was away because she was both Mama and Daddy, to which Cam had once giggled, “No, she’s not the daddy, she just pretends to be tough.” In a way this was true. Josie coaxed obedience, but Bear’s word was law.

  In the photograph, Camilla, then almost six, stood next to Bear, one of her arms around his shoulder, her face close to his, pointing up their remarkable resemblance. Lila was at Josie’s side, trying-tobe-a-big-girl at four, with her hands laced obediently at her waist. Both girls were wearing identical white eyelet, puff-sleeved dresses she’d made them for Easter, with white gloves and tiny gold crosses she’d bought at the PX. Lila had a bow in her hair, but Camilla had taken off her bow, saying it was babyish. Josie had reasoned and cajoled, then Bear had brought Cam into line with an order to “shape up,” and the photographer had arranged them.

  In the picture there was no hint of disagreement. All—even milky-eyed Evie—seemed to be smiling and focusing in the same direction, as though they all saw the same bright and limitless future. Actually, they’d been focusing on a toy bird the photographer was holding up next to his right ear. A yellow plastic bird with a single, bent feather in its tail. And to keep the children’s attention, Josie’d quoted the Emily Dickinson poem she loved: “ ‘Hope’ is the thing with feathers—That perches in the soul—And sings the tune without the words—And never stops—at all—.” But how long could one hope?

  “I’m a mother,” Peatsy had once said to her, “because I was born with female equipment in the days before the Pill. But you’re a different kind of mother. No matter how old your children get, you’re still watching them for signs of improvement.” Josie knew this was true. Despite all sense and reason she couldn’t give up worrying about her children, couldn’t give up wondering where she’d failed. Hadn’t she birthed, nursed, and cuddled them? Hadn’t she tucked them in, read to them,
kissed their hurts, taught them manners, disciplined them even when it had hurt her to do so? Hadn’t she watched, hawk-eyed, for their individual tastes and talents, and fostered those talents as best she knew how? Even after they’d left home, hadn’t she called and written, fiddled with the bank account to send them money, taken them back in whenever they’d wanted? Hadn’t she scaled down all her great expectations to a tepid “Whatever makes you happy” that secretly stuck in her craw? But none of her understanding, compromises, or maneuvering had helped. All of her children (even, if she looked beneath the surface, Lila) were lost to her. It was one thing that her marriage had started on a tidal wave of love, then shipwrecked, and bleached and dried to bitterness. That happened to so many women. But her failure with her children—that was the ache for which there was no painkiller, the foghorn she heard on the sunniest days.

  “Stop this,” she said out loud. She tightened the sash on her satin dressing gown and turned to make the bed. She maintained her weight at a respectable 135, so it must be the dressing gown, a slinky Jean Harlow affair with swirling skirt and wide sleeves, that made her feel fat and foolish. Lila said, rightly, that it was old and tatty and her inability to throw it out was a sign of her “Depression mentality.” Lila gave her a robe almost every Christmas, expensive but practical, grandmotherly robes in pastel colors, with ruffles, pockets, and zippers. But she couldn’t bear to throw out this old jade satin one. It was the last gift Cam had given to her out of love and it had come with a note saying, “For the secret you.” None of the others would have guessed that she’d want something so glamorous and impractical.

  Even as a child, Cam’d had that uncanny ability to sniff out what was really going on. When she was no more than four, Cam could sense Josie’s upset and unhappiness. She would comfort her, touching her hand or her cheek, giving her a “make-it-better kiss.” But all that had changed when Cam was about twelve. Then she’d turned with a fury, seeming to blame Josie for everything. There’d been that awful Christmas when Bear had called from Okinawa at the last minute and said that his commanding officer had canceled his leave, so he wouldn’t be coming home as planned. That was the first time she hadn’t been able to deny her suspicions that he really didn’t want to come home, when she’d known undeniably that he was lying.

  She’d struggled to make the holiday special—the tree, the presents, the twelve-pound turkey. But on Christmas morning Cam had refused to get out of bed, and when Josie had ordered her to get up, she’d yelled, “Oh, tell us about the old days when you were grateful to get an orange in your Christmas stocking,” and Josie had slapped her—not a don’t-run-out-in-the-street wallop on the butt or a swift stop-being-sassy flick on the arm—but a real across-the-face slap, as though they were mortal enemies. Child abuse, they’d call it nowadays, though at the time she’d been so desperate, so beside herself with worry that she was lucky she hadn’t picked up a knife and killed them all. “Childrens,” Cuba had said last week when her youngest daughter (who’d run off to Philadelphia and left a child in her care) had called to say she couldn’t make it home for Christmas, “might as well raise a flock of blackbirds to peck out y’eyes.”

  She finished making the bed, deciding that she would have the jade satin robe cleaned one last time. Then she’d wrap it in tissue paper and mothballs and put it in the storage room, along with Mawmaw and Grand’s useless furniture, the christening gowns, the prom dresses, the butter churn, the windup gramophone, the boxes of papers dating back to great-grandfather Marion’s enlistment papers for the Civil War, the diplomas, the photographs, Bear’s unfinished memoirs, and his gun collection. Sometimes she wished she could be more like her sister Edna, who lived next door with her husband, Dozier. Nothing was sacred to Edna. She made a clean sweep every two or three years, throwing out clothes, appliances, furniture. She’d even changed the lovely veranda that wrapped around the side of her house into a “Florida room,” replacing screens with louvered windows, painting the ceiling (which, in keeping with the tradition of most of the historic homes, had been a pale aqua) a midnight blue and pasting it with luminescent stars. But she could never be like Edna. Decades of moving from one base to another had changed Josie’s natural desire to nest into a compulsion to hoard and preserve. Part of the reason she’d wanted this five-bedroom antebellum house was so she could save it all. And if she ever had to give it up (a recent 60 Minutes segment about an old woman who’d been stripped of her belongings and shunted off to a nursing home came to mind), she’d just set a match to it.

  Alarmed at such incendiary thoughts, she stripped off her nightdress and went into the shower. She gave herself a shampoo, singing “I’m Gonna Wash That Man Right Outta My Hair,” toweled and powdered herself, put on her underwear and pantyhose. Twisting her long salt-and-pepper hair into a topknot, she pulled out a few strands and curled them with mousse, the way Lila had taught her to do. Moving so close to the mirror that her nose was almost touching it, she examined her face. She didn’t really think of it as her face anymore—her real face was left behind in that family portrait—this face was just something she had to deal with, like the weeds in her garden. She plucked a wiry white hair from one of her eyebrows, stroked a tad of blusher high on her cheeks, touched her mouth with rose-colored lipstick, and muttered, “That’ll do.”

  She put on her gray, pleated skirt, buttoned up her paisley blouse, threw a cardigan over her shoulders, and slipped her feet into her sneakers. Her mouth was watering for some of her homemade sausage and it was good to think that she’d be sharing it, even with paying guests. Most of her friends were financially better off than she and felt sorry that she had to run a bed-and-breakfast, but she didn’t mind. At least she wasn’t an old woman rattling around her house like a marble in a coffee can. She’d gotten used to sleeping alone, doing most everything alone, way before Bear had died, but eating alone was downright uncivilized.

  After the Canadian couple had breakfasted and gone, as she was carrying dishes to the sink, Josie looked out the window and saw her brother-in-law cutting across her backyard. Though Dozier had retired years ago, it still surprised her to see him in work clothes instead of his three-piece suit. She watched as he stopped, stuffed his hands into the back pockets of his jeans, looked up at the largest live oak, and sighed so deeply she could see his shoulders heave. When the last hurricane had snapped off some of the tree’s outer branches, Dozier had wanted to cut it back. But Edna’d said that an old man up a ladder with a chainsaw was just asking to be made an amputee and, “If you think I’m gonna spend the rest of my life playing nursie, you’ve got another think comin’.” Josie knew Edna was right. From this distance, despite near baldness and a slight paunch, Dozier looked rangy and fit, but his grip was not as strong as it had once been, and his new glasses couldn’t restore his vision to its former sharpness. But she sympathized with Dozier. Like her, he wanted to keep on keepin’ on, even if it involved a certain amount of risk.

  She knew he’d never liked the lumber business he’d inherited but he’d taken his role as provider so seriously that he’d worked for decades to turn the company into a lucrative tri-state firm. All those years he’d been in harness, he’d fantasized about retirement. But retirement had proved to be a disappointment, like some beautiful girl he’d longed for from afar but found he didn’t much like once he got to know her. Always handy around the house, he channeled his restlessness into carpentry and repair. He hammered creaky stairs, built bookcases and windowboxes, carved wooden toys for kids who preferred Nintendo. He haunted secondhand stores, scrounging for broken lamps, busted ceiling fans, old radios, which he fixed and donated to church bazaars where, Edna pointed out, they were sold (if at all) for the same price he’d paid for them. But his handiness was a blessing for Josie. Bear had mastered aerodynamics, radar, and complex weaponry but he’d hated household maintenance so much that he’d griped if she’d asked him to change a light bulb. But Dozier anticipated repairs and fixed things without being asked.

/>   In return for all the work he did around her house, she’d taught him about gardening and, on the q.t., slipped him the spicy, cholesterol-heavy delights Edna had banned from her table. “You two belong together,” Edna would say. “You’re both as housebound as neutered cats.” But Dozier was far from neutered. Sometimes when their eyes met, Josie felt a current between them. Not the blood rush of youth, but a deep fondness, all the more tender because they both knew that it would never be spoken of, let alone acted upon. She didn’t think she knew Dozier better than Edna did, but she knew him differently. Sometimes a wife didn’t see the forest for the trees. Sometimes a wife didn’t appreciate.

  She busied herself with the dishes as he came through the back door. He said, “Morning, sister,” and she smiled at the country greeting and told him to help himself to the last of the sausage and biscuits. He picked up a knife, reached for the butter, decided against that indulgence but couldn’t resist the peach preserves. “Waited till I saw your last night’s guests leave ’bout ten minutes ago,” he said. “Saw they had Canadian plates.”

  “All the way from Toronto,” she told him, taking off her rings and putting them on the shelf above the sink. He offered to load the dishwasher, but she said, “I don’t mind doin’ them by hand if there’s just a few.” She actually enjoyed the feel of the warm suds, the squeak when she rinsed the plates, the sense that she could make something visibly better in the space of fifteen minutes. “They were a real nice couple,” she told him. “He’s an engineer and she’s an art teacher, or at least she was. They’ve been trying to get pregnant for about five years, and now she’s expecting, so she’s taking a leave of absence to ...” He nodded. It always amazed him how women managed to find out intimate details of strangers’ lives.