Chapter 6 - The Shattering of the House
The ballroom had ceased to be an anniversary party. It was a court-martial.
Natalie was still on the riser, weeping into her palms, her scarlet dress ruined by the sugar and grease from the cake table. My mother had not moved from her chair at Table One; she sat with her face buried in her silk napkin, her shoulders shaking with that dry, silent, narcissistic weeping of a woman whose social standing had just been incinerated in front of the wives of the Appellate Division.
My father stood by the centerpiece, his hand trembling as he reached for a glass of water.
"Clara," he rasped, his voice ancient, cracked, stripped of all its judicial authority. "Your sister... she has nowhere to go. If Marcus’s wife takes the house... if Eric has no salary... what is to become of her? She is carrying a child."
I looked at the woman on the floor.
I remembered the summer of nineteen-ninety-eight. I was ten years old; Natalie was two. She had fallen into the tidal pool behind our cottage in Beaufort, and I had dived into the oyster shells to pull her out, cutting my forearms to the bone on the sharp lime edges. I had carried her two miles down the sand road to the clinic, my blood dripping into the dust, while she cried for our mother.
I had spent twenty-eight years carrying her.
And every time I set her down on dry grass, she had reached into my pockets to see what she could steal.
"She has the trust, Father," I said into the silence.
Arthur blinked, his rheumy eyes widening slightly. "The... the Carter trust?"
"The trust you established for her thirty-first birthday," I said. "The one you funded by selling the five hundred acres of timberland in Bulloch County that Grandfather left to me in his will."
The room went completely dead.
"You thought I didn't know, Father?" I continued, stepping toward him until the microphone cord pulled taut behind me. "You thought because I was deployed to Kandahar, because I was sleeping in a modular bunker behind the airfield, that I didn't see the deed transfer registered with the county clerk in Statesboro? You told me the timber had burned in the pine beetle blight. You told me the land was worthless."
"Clara," Arthur whispered, his chin trembling. "The taxes... the family was in debt..."
"The family was not in debt," I said. "Natalie wanted a boutique on Broughton Street. She wanted to play the grand lady of Savannah fashion. And when that boutique failed in eighteen months, you used my grandfather’s land to settle her balance with the factoring house."
I looked at Natalie.
She lifted her head, her mascara smeared across her cheekbones in dark, oily tracks, her eyes wide with terror.
"The trust holds two hundred and ten thousand dollars, Natalie," I said. "That is what remains of our grandfather’s seventy years of farming. Take it. Rent an apartment in Queens. Buy yourself a stroller, buy yourself some baby clothes, and learn how to cook your own soup."
"Clara... please," Natalie sobbed, her hands reaching toward my hem. "You’re my sister. We’re blood. You can't leave me like this... not with his baby..."
"You are Marcus’s liability now," I said. "Not mine."
I turned to the bandleader, who was standing frozen behind the bass amplifier, holding his trumpet by the valve casing.
"Bandleader," I said, my voice smooth, clear, and perfectly modulated.
The man jumped. "Yes, ma'am?"
"The contract for this evening includes four hours of live music and an open bar until midnight," I said. "The bill was paid in full six weeks ago from my personal account."
I looked across the three hundred guests—at the cousins, the business associates, the society women who had whispered about my "coldness" for a decade while taking my tickets to the Metropolitan Museum galas.
"Enjoy the champagne, ladies and gentlemen," I said. "The band knows how to play The Party's Over."
I laid the microphone down on the white damask of Table One.
It did not make a sound; I had turned the toggle off with my thumb before the casing touched the linen.
I turned my back on my husband, my sister, and my parents.
Grant Miller fell into step beside me, two paces behind my left shoulder, his red folder tucked under his arm, his heavy stride clearing a path through the frozen crowd toward the brass double doors of the foyer.
Nobody spoke.
May you like
Nobody moved.
As the heavy oak doors swung inward, the sound of Natalie’s weeping was finally cut off by the thick, soundproofed mahogany, leaving the Grand St. Regis behind me like a tomb whose seals had been broken from the inside.
