Charlotte's Story (Bliss House Novels)
Laura Benedict
For Monica and Teresa,
my sisters, my friends
Far safer, of a midnight meeting
External ghost,
Than an interior confronting
That whiter host.
—EMILY DICKINSON
Charlotte’s
Story
Chapter 1
1957: The End of Time
We came to the end of time on a bright October afternoon. I had finished a second glass of champagne even though I thought three o’clock in the afternoon was a ridiculous time to be drinking wine. But that’s what we were doing because Press said we’d been too sad for too long and needed cheering. We were the only adults in the house for the first time in two months since his mother, Olivia, had died. The wine was the color of hay bathed in sunshine, sparkling in the filtered afternoon light of the salon. All the furnishings in the substantial room—the ornate European furniture, the gilt-edged mirrors and antique carpets—spoke of my mother-in-law’s preference for stateliness over comfort, and I had never dared to even slip my shoes off inside it. Now Bliss House and its orchards and woods were ours, and the birthright of our two children, Eva and Michael. I was mistress of Bliss House, but I didn’t quite feel it yet, and wondered if I ever would.
Press took the bottle of Perrier-Jouet—his favorite, and what his mother had served at our wedding party—from the ice bucket to pour me a third glass.
“We shouldn’t, Press. Really, we shouldn’t.” Secretly, I wanted more, but I protested because I thought I should. It was in my nature. Or, more rightly, in my bourgeois upbringing. (Bourgeois as in NOCD—Not our class, darling, as the thoughtlessly raised Yankee girls at Burton Hall, my college, used to say.) I was taught that people who drank in the afternoons were useless, and probably drunks.
In answer, Press bent to touch his lips to my neck, tickling the tender skin beneath my right ear, and I felt the roughness of the late-day growth of his beard. With an agonizing slowness that I knew was intentional, his lips found my mouth and he kissed me deeply in a way that implied both hunger and possession.
Had Bliss House still belonged to his mother, he certainly never would have kissed me with such passion outside the privacy of our bedroom.
When he stood again, he was smiling and I was self-conscious of the flush that consumed my torso, neck, and face. Even my ears felt hot. The glass refilled, I drank as deeply as I dared, given the frantic bubbles. Press knew me well enough to know that my protest that we shouldn’t drink any more had held self-censure but not conviction. I was exhausted from caring for the children, and the wine was tempting.
There is a haze around that afternoon that I’ll never be able to dispel, and I can’t remember if I truly could smell the scent of the roses just outside the room. The screens were still in the French doors that opened onto the gardens: a boxwood maze with a tall statue of the goddess Hera with her peacock at its center, and geometric rows of cultivated rose bushes. It was only early October and, because the climate in central Virginia is not overly harsh, the roses would continue to bloom through the earliest days of November. Their scent is strongest around four or five o’clock when the hum of the bees finishing their day’s work is most hypnotic. But I choose to believe that I did smell the roses. Some small recompense for the hell that was about to be unleashed on us.
Press sat down on the hassock in front of the tufted slipper chair into which I had sunk and lifted my feet onto his lap.
I laughed and tried to pull away, but he held my heels firmly.
“Preston Bliss, what are you doing?” I’d teased him in the past about not liking to touch my feet. In fact, he didn’t much like anyone’s feet—not even the baby’s, which I was kissing and playing with all the time. But now he was sliding off one of my shoes, and then the other, so that my feet were bare in his hands. Some women wore stockings daily throughout the 1950s, but that day they seemed unnecessary, given that the staff had the day off and we weren’t planning to leave the house. He massaged my feet for a few moments, making me giggle as he stroked the arch of my foot with his smooth, uncallused fingers (he was a gentleman, a lawyer, and had never become as interested in working the estate’s orchards as his mother had imagined he should be). The house was so quiet that my laughter filled the room, and I quickly covered my mouth as though someone might hear. Olivia hadn’t minded laughter, but the room spoke so much of her that she might have been with us, watching from one of the enormous wing chairs stationed near the fireplace like guardians at the entrance to an ashen cave, instead of in the graveyard of St. Anselm’s Episcopal church buried beside her husband.