Lavender Morning
"HELEN?" ASKED THE person on the other end of the line. "Helen Aldredge?"
If anyone had asked her, Helen would have said that it had been so long since she'd heard Edilean Harcourt's voice that she wouldn't have recognized it. But she did. She'd heard those elegant, patrician tones only a few times, but each time had been significant. Because of who the caller was, Helen didn't point out that her married name was Connor. "Miss Edi? Is that you?"
"What a good memory you have."
Helen visualized the woman as she remembered her: tall, thin, perfect posture, her dark hair never out of place. Her clothes were always of the finest quality and of a timeless style. She had to be close to ninety now -- Helen's father David's age. "I had good ancestors,"
Helen said, then wanted to bite her tongue. Her father and Miss Edi had once been engaged to marry, but when Edilean returned from World War II, her beloved David was married to Helen's mother, Mary Alice Welsch. The trauma had been so great that Miss Edi turned the big, old house her family had owned for generations over to her wastrel of a brother, left the town named for her ancestress, and never married. Even today, some of the older people in Edilean spoke of the Great Tragedy -- and they still looked at Helen's mother with cool eyes. What David and Mary Alice had done caused the end of the direct line of the Harcourt family -- the founding family. Since Edilean, Virginia, was so near Colonial Williamsburg, losing direct descendants of people who had hobnobbed with George Washington and Thomas Jefferson was a major blow to them.
"Yes, you do have good ancestry," Miss Edi said without hesitation. "In fact, I'm so sure of your capabilities that I decided to ask you to help me."
"Help you?" Helen asked cautiously. All her life she'd been told of the feuds and anger that had come about because of what happened in her father's lifetime. She wasn't supposed to have heard about it, because everything was talked about in whispers, but Helen had always been a curious person. She'd sat to one side of the porch, played with her dolls, and listened.
"Yes, dear, help," Miss Edi said in a patronizing way that made Helen blush. "I'm not going to ask you to bake a hundred cookies for the church sale, so you can get that out of your mind."
"I wasn't -- " Helen started to defend herself, then stopped. She was at the kitchen sink and she could see her husband, James, outside struggling with the new bird feeder. Someone should outlaw retirement for men, she thought for the thousandth time. Without a doubt, James would come in angry about the feeder and she'd have to listen to his tirade. He used to manage hundreds of employees across several states, but now all he had was his wife and grown son to boss around. More than once Helen had gone running to wherever Luke was and asked if she could spend the afternoon with him. Luke would give her that amused look of his and set her to weeding.
"All right," Helen said, "what can I help you with?" Never mind that she hadn't spoken to this woman in what? Twenty years?
"I've been told that I have less than a year to live and -- " She cut off at a sound from Helen. "Please, no sympathy. No one has ever wanted to leave this earth more than I do. I've been here much too long. But being told I have a full year left has made me think about what I still need to do in my life."
At that, Helen smiled. Miss Edi might no longer live in the town named after her great-something grandmother, but she'd made an impact on it. That the town still existed was due to Miss Edi. "You've done a lot for Edilean. You've -- "
"Yes, dear, I know I've paid for things and written letters and raised a ruckus when people wanted to take away our homes. I've done all that, but that was easy. It just took money and noise. What I haven't done is right some wrongs that happened when I was a young woman."
Helen nearly groaned aloud. Here it comes, she thought. The Story. The one about how her mother, Mary Alice, stole Miss Edi's boyfriend at the end of World War II. Poor Miss Edi. Rotten ol' Mary Alice. She'd heard it all before. "Yes, I know -- "
"No, no," Miss Edi said, yet again cutting Helen off. "I'm not talking about what your parents did back when the dinosaurs roamed the earth. That's done with. I'm talking about now, today. What happened then has changed today."
Frowning, Helen turned away from the sight of her husband kicking the bird feeder, which he couldn't get to stand upright. "You mean that if my father had married you, quite a few lives would be different," she said slowly.
"Perhaps," Miss Edi said, but she sounded amused. "What do you know about the fourteenth of November, 1941?"
"That it was just before the attack on Pearl Harbor?" Helen asked cautiously.
"Then I take it that your eavesdropping when you were a little girl didn't let you hear everything, did it?"
In spite of herself, Helen laughed. "No, it didn't. Miss Edi, would you please tell me what this is about? My husband is about to come in for lunch, so I don't have much time."
"I want you to come here to Florida to visit me. Think you can bear to be away from your husband for that long?"
"The man is retired. I may move in with you."
Miss Edi gave a dry little laugh. "All right, but you can't tell anyone where you're going or who you're seeing. I have some things to talk to you about, and we have to figure out how you're going to do what has to be done. I will, of course, pay for everything. Unless you're not interested, that is."
"A free trip? Secrets revealed? I'm very interested. How do we arrange this?"
"I'll send all the travel information to my house and you can pick it up there. How's that handsome son of yours?"
Helen hesitated. Should she give the stock answer she gave to everyone else? Hardly anyone knew the full extent of what Luke had been through in the last few years, but Helen thought that, somehow, Miss Edi knew. "He's recovering slowly. Mostly he hides out in the gardens around town and digs holes. He doesn't want to talk to anyone about his problems, not even me."
"How about if I change his life?"
CLARE!" CAPTAIN OWENS yelled at his sergeant, who was leaning against the jeep and staring into space. When he got no response, he waved his hand in front of his face but there was no reaction. "What the hells wrong with him?" He looked to a corporal standing on the other side of the jeep.
"Her," Corporal Smith said as he reached up and took a cigarette from David Clares lips. It was burning down and about to singe him.
"Who?" the captain asked impatiently. Sometimes these men didn't seem to realize there was a war going on.
The corporal took a last drag off Clare's cigarette, then nodded toward the big building in front of them. It had once been beautiful, but now a quarter of it was rubble. Standing on the steps was General Austin, a short bulldog of a man who seemed to believe all words should be uttered as quickly, as succinctly, and as loudly as possible. His orders had been known to put tears in grown men's eyes. The soldiers played a game they called "Worse than Austin." First line of battle or fifteen minutes alone with Austin? Torture or Austin? In the last year they'd developed a catchphrase. "Better than Austin." They used it when they were about to charge into gunfire. "This is Better than Austin," they'd say before attaching bayonets and charging.
The short, sturdy general was standing on the steps, bawling out three young officers, and Sergeant Clare was staring at him as though he were in a trance.
"Austin?" the captain said in disgust. "He's paralyzed by Austin? Oh hell! Get somebody else to drive the bastard. Clare! Come with me."
Sergeant Clare didn't move.
"Not him," Corporal Smith said. "Her!"
Captain Owens looked back just as "she" stepped from behind a pillar, and he smiled. Oh yeah, her. Miss Edilean Harcourt, the general's secretary. The Untouchable One. The woman who it sometimes seemed the entire military force lusted after, but no man had been able to get near. There was a rumor that her legs were three and a half feet long and there was a lot of discussion of what a man would do with legs like that.
Whatever their fantasies, no man had so much as received a smile from Miss Edilean Harcourt -- but not for want of trying. Every type of man had tried every method known to win her. From an Englishman with an accent so elegant it was whispered he was royalty, to an American GI who'd grown up in the LA slums, they all tried.
Flowers, candy, love poems, nylons, even a banner saying MISS EDI, i LOVE YOU strung across the building during the night had elicited no response from her.
It had been a great game for the men who'd been there a while to watch the newcomers fall apart when they first saw Edilean Har-court. She was a foot taller than the general and had a patrician beauty that the men couldn't take their eyes off. The most common phrase uttered by new soldiers was, "She's a goddess."
When "that look" was seen in a new man's eyes, money started changing hands. They bet on the number of days it would take before he was given Miss Edi's "drop dead" look, and what the poor man would do to try to win her. They knew the general kept the chocolates sent to her, and he threw the flowers out the window. It was his hay fever. As for the nylons, all anyone knew was that all the girls in General Austin's office wore perfect nylons.
So now Captain Owens shook his head and closed his eyes for a moment. Another man had fallen under her spell. "How long has he been like this?" he asked the corporal.
"Since yesterday. I don't think he slept last night, just lay awake staring at the ceiling."
"Great," the captain said in sarcasm. "Just what I need. Clare was sent here specially to be Austin's driver. He drove another general straight through enemy fire, didn't blink an eye. He's up for some medal, and Austin wants him."
The corporal glanced at David Clare. He was a tall young man, dark blond hair, and blue eyes, and he was still standing in comatose silence as he stared at the woman on the porch. "From the look of him, he'd throw himself on a bomb for her."
"Yeah, well, so would we all, but she'd probably just step over. his body."
JOCE WAS SITTING quietly in Dr. Dave's study and she was thinking about Miss Edi and her beloved David. She knew what happened next. He was killed and she was burned.
"That's only the beginning of the story," Luke said softly.
"The beginning? That was the end of it."
"No," Dr. Dave said. "Right after you told me about General Austin I wanted to go to New Hampshire and see if I could get the letters."
Joce looked at Luke. "That's what you two were talking about that night at dinner."
"Yes," he said, "and that's why I didn't want you to go with me, but you nagged until I couldn't stand it anymore, so I let you go, then you got your feelings hurt because -- "