Whitefern (Audrina 2)

“How kind,” he said. “I do love your biscuits.”

“Sylvia makes them all the time now,” I said.

She was beaming with pride.

I watched for a few more minutes and then went downstairs. While I waited, I read the papers Mr. Johnson had sent home with Arden. There was no question about the end result once I signed them. Arden would have complete control of everything, even of the disposition of Whitefern, because it had been added as a company asset. If Arden made tragic mistakes, the house itself could fall into jeopardy. I knew enough about business to predict that he would leverage it to raise more money to invest in the stock market.

I would never sign this, I thought. It might bring our truce and tender loving to a quick end, but it truly was as though Papa were standing right behind me and reading over my shoulder. I could hear him whisper. Don’t do it, Audrina. Don’t sign those papers.

“Don’t worry, Papa,” I whispered back. “I won’t.”

I smiled, thinking that I should never criticize Sylvia for imagining that Papa was still here.

Maybe we were both

still children of Whitefern.

Maybe we’d never be anything else.

Awakenings

Arden’s upbeat temperament was unchanged for the remainder of the week. He came home from work happy and excited about the successes he was having in the stock market and the compliments he was getting from clients. He practically bounced when he walked and always charged up the stairway with a show of energy that brought smiles to both Sylvia and me. We could hear him singing upstairs while he showered and changed his clothes.

At dinner, he would go on and on about the maneuvers he had made and how brilliantly they had turned out. I had never heard Papa brag as much about his business achievements. Although he’d enjoyed making money, especially after failing so much in the beginning, he never seemed to have Arden’s passion for it. Perhaps it was because Arden was younger and was surprising himself with his success, or maybe he thought it was important to impress me.

The pleasure he was getting at work spilled over into everything we were doing at home. According to Arden, our dinners had never been as good as they suddenly seemed to him, especially some of the new recipes I had found. He used to accuse me of experimenting on him and complain about being a guinea pig, but now he even complimented Sylvia on her contribution to our dinners, even if it was something as simple as whipping up mashed potatoes or chopping onions.

He would even pause once in a while, look around, and tell me the house had never looked as well kept. I waited for the inevitable suggestion that it would look far better if we got rid of the old furniture and redecorated, but he didn’t say that. He didn’t even suggest it by harping on the threadbare rugs.

Any compliment he gave me he shared with Sylvia. Through the years, especially before Papa died, he would avoid looking at her and never spoke directly to her, only about her. According to him now, Sylvia was surprisingly bright, even funny. Sometimes he even gave her a hug and kissed her on the forehead when he came home at the end of the work day.

“How are my women?” he would cry, and Sylvia would look so pleased. “My beautiful women.” It didn’t sound at all like a false compliment, and truthfully, it couldn’t be, for Sylvia was looking more beautiful.

“Those lessons must be doing her a world of good,” he declared one evening at dinner. He gazed across the table at Sylvia, who looked as surprised as I was. “You were very wise to arrange for it, Audrina. What a wonderful mother you would make,” he added, but not with any note of sadness. “Oh, no,” he went on to correct himself. “Will make. Won’t she, Sylvia?”

“When there is a baby,” Sylvia said, and he laughed.

I had to laugh, too, at how positive she sounded.

“That’s right. You can’t be a mother unless you have a child,” Arden told her. “You want Audrina to have a child to care for and spoil like you’ve been spoiled, right?” He looked at me quickly and added, “Any woman as pretty as you two should be spoiled.”

“A baby is coming,” she said.

She looked at me as if she and I shared a secret, but Arden didn’t seem to notice that conspiratorial expression. As far as I knew, she had never told him about her drawing, and if she had, he had never mentioned it to me. All he knew was my saying that she had dreamed about it, not that Papa specifically had instructed her to draw a baby as the way to bring a child to Whitefern.

Every time I sat with her and Mr. Price after one of her lessons, I listened carefully to see if she had said anything to give him any idea of why she had been working on a drawing of a baby. Apparently, she hadn’t, because he never revealed anything remotely associated with it. He talked about her natural artistic talent and praised her for how quickly she grasped visual concepts. I went up to watch every lesson for the first week and a half and saw that he was right. He didn’t have to show Sylvia something more than once. How I wished Papa had lived to see this. It occurred to me that she really was visually brilliant. How ironic, but how wonderful, I thought.

It had been so long since we had such a pleasant and hopeful atmosphere at Whitefern. I worried that it wouldn’t last. Every night, I anticipated Arden’s asking me about the papers, whether I had read them and agreed to sign them, and every night, he surprised me by not making the slightest reference to them. Why had something that was so important to him, something that he was adamant and angry about, drifted away? My suspicious mind began to explore the darkest possibilities. Being leery and apprehensive was not an unexpected feeling in this house. If there was one thing Whitefern was fertile with, it was the dark weeds of human wickedness. After all, I grew up with the admonition never to trust kindness or believe in smiles.

I began to consider possibilities. Would Arden have forged my signature, even my fingerprint, or could he have paid off Mr. Johnson to accept it? He would certainly feel confident that I would never take my own husband to court. I wondered if I should call Mr. Johnson to ask. Would Arden be enraged that I even suggested such a thing, especially if he didn’t do what I suspected? I couldn’t ask Mr. Johnson not to tell him I had called. Why would he keep my confidence over Arden’s? I had met our attorney only a few times at social events in the house, and he had spent very little time talking to me. I had the sense that, like Papa and certainly Arden, he didn’t think women were capable of doing well in business or even understanding it.

Could it be that Arden believed that if he didn’t bother asking me about the papers for quite a while, I would lose interest in them, too, and whatever he had done would go unnoticed? I hadn’t mentioned anything about my becoming a broker since I had broached the subject the first time. I hadn’t even researched what I would have to do to get a license or asked any questions about it, and Arden hadn’t brought it up. Maybe he was simply being cautious. Papa used to say, “If you don’t ask questions about things that will upset you, you’ll never get upset.” He believed that just ignoring something often made it go away. If I remembered his advice, Arden certainly would, for despite how critical he was of Papa, he did respect him when it came to worldly and business knowledge.

Perhaps he was complimenting Sylvia and accepting her being tutored because he believed it meant I would be more involved in her life and, as a result, I would drop the idea of doing anything more than caring for Whitefern, Sylvia, and him. Maybe our lovemaking and talk of a baby were designed to keep me dreaming. As long as I did that, I did nothing to challenge the status quo.

However, the nicer he was to both of us, the guiltier I felt about having any suspicions. I made an effort to put them aside. With Sylvia devoting more and more of her time to her art, I really did have more to do in the house anyway. It took time to get her to prepare herself for instruction, and after the lesson was over, she was too excited to polish furniture or wash a kitchen floor, sometimes even to help with dinner. Whatever assignment Mr. Price gave her for the days in between she took very seriously and devoted all her energy to it. I didn’t have the heart to pull her away for menial work.

Often now, I left her alone in the cupola and did my grocery shopping without her. I knew she didn’t hear me say I was leaving; she was concentrating too hard. So I put a note on her door reminding her. I felt less insecure about it, knowing she was too occupied to get into trouble like going out on her own and wandering.