“Loved her?” Sara said. “The truth is that there are few people still alive who really knew her. Except for Aunt Mary Alice, that is, but she can’t very well love her, now can she?”
“I don’t know,” Joce said. “Why couldn’t your aunt Mary Alice love Miss Edi?”
“I thought you two were friends. Surely you must know Miss Edi’s tragic love story?”
Joce gave a sigh. “Until a few days ago I would have said I knew nearly everything about her, but I’m learning that I didn’t know that much. She never mentioned Edilean, Virginia, or this house. I do know that she was once deeply in love with a young man from here who was killed in World War II.”
“Killed!” Sara said. “Killed by feisty little Mary Alice Welsch getting herself pregnant by him and making him marry her. When Miss Edi came home from the war there was the man she loved, married to someone else.”
Once again Jocelyn had that feeling of betrayal. This wasn’t the story she’d been told. All the love that Miss Edi had told her about, her great, deep love for David Aldredge, hadn’t ended in death. It had ended in a shotgun wedding. No wonder Miss Edi never mentioned Edilean and no wonder she lied about her beloved’s death. Better death than betrayal!
Jo
ce tried to compose herself so Sara couldn’t see what she was feeling. “Didn’t all this happen a long, long time ago?” Joce asked. “You make it sound like it happened yesterday.”
“This is Virginia and we remember things. My grandmother used to tell me stories about the War Between the States. She knew who loved whom and who was jilted. So now I tell stories from another war. Whatever, I’ve heard Miss Edi’s story a thousand times. The Harcourt family started the town, owned the biggest house, laid out the town square, all that. Even after they lost most of their money, they were still the most important family. By World War II, the McDowells were far richer, but they didn’t have the cachet the Harcourts did.”
As Joce finished her tea, she tried to put the real story together. “So Miss Edi came home from World War II, her legs a mass of burn scars, and she found out that the man she loved had married someone else?”
“That’s right.”
“So what did she do?” Joce asked.
“The house and what money the family had left was in Miss Edi’s name, but she turned the house over to her younger brother. I don’t know about the money. My Great-aunt Lissie used to say that Bertrand wasn’t much of a man.”
“What does that mean? That he didn’t ride horses up the staircase at midnight?”
“Now, now, don’t let the Yankee in you come to the surface.”
“Sorry,” Joce said, but she was smiling. “I’ve read too many romantic novels.”
“Haven’t we all? As I was saying, Miss Edi came back, saw her man had been stolen from her, so she gave the house to her lazy brother and left town. But not before she had MAW draw up a forty-five-page contract for her brother to sign. She may have been hurt, but she wasn’t stupid.”
“MAW?” Joce asked.
“The local law firm. McDowell, Aldredge, and Welsch.”
“Aldredge,” Jocelyn said under her breath, then louder, “always the same names. Tell me, do you people ever move away from your hometown like the rest of the U.S. does?”
“They do, but we stay.”
Joce nodded. “Right. The tourists. The outsiders. They come and go, but yawl stay.”
“You didn’t say it correctly, so you might as well quit trying. You have to be at least third-generation Southern to be able to say ‘you all’ correctly.”
“I’ll keep that in mind. What happened to Miss Edi’s brother?”
“Died in his sleep years ago. Aunt Lissie said he was a man who could do absolutely nothing and make himself believe it was work.”
“I think I may have met him,” Joce said. “I might even have dated him.”
“I knew the moment we met that you and I had a lot in common.”
They smiled at each other, two women in mutual understanding, then they sat in silence for a while and Joce looked out over the grounds. She still wasn’t used to the idea that she was now a property owner. She glanced back at the house, at the sheer, perfect beauty of it, and felt cold chills come over her arms.
Nor had she reconciled herself to the fact that the woman who’d practically been her mother had either left out a lot about her life, or had outright lied to her. Jocelyn had lived with the idea of the “perfect love” Miss Edi’d had for a fallen soldier since she first heard it when she was a child. In fact, the image of that love had been her guide, her yardstick that she’d measured her every relationship against. When a man got serious, Jocelyn asked herself if this was a man she loved with the passion that Miss Edi had felt for her David. No man, no feelings Joce had ever had, had come close to the picture of “true love” that Miss Edi planted there.
But now Jocelyn was finding out that Miss Edi’s great love was just a tawdry affair. The man had jilted her for another woman.