The Promise Read online

  Also by Ann Weisgarber

  The Personal History of Rachel DuPree

  Shortlisted for the Orange Award for New Writers

  Longlisted for the Orange Prize

  Copyright © 2013, 2014 Ann Weisgarber

  First published in the United Kingdom by Mantle, an imprint of Pan Macmillan, a division of Macmillan Publishers Limited

  All Rights Reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any manner without the express written consent of the publisher, except in the case of brief excerpts in critical reviews or articles. All inquiries should be addressed to Skyhorse Publishing, 307 West 36th Street, 11th Floor, New York, NY 10018.

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  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available on file.

  ISBN: 978-1-62914-236-4

  Printed in the United States of America

  For Will Atkins

  The shore is smooth, the air cool and balmy, the surf sparkling surges upon the sands with the sound of music. Fair ladies with gallant gentlemen in high buggies meet buggies and pass them freighted in kind. It is romance-inspiring, this driving by the sea.

  Galveston Daily News

  May 24, 1868

  Tell all the Truth but tell it slant—

  Emily Dickinson

  PROLOGUE

  The Vigil

  October 1899

  There wasn’t nothing good about funerals. The very notion of them was a disturbance. I’ve told my kin, when my time comes, don’t lay me out for people to look at. Just close the coffin and bury me quick. But these Catholics had other notions. They stretched a funeral like nobody else could.

  That was how it was for Bernadette. She was laid out in the middle of her parlor with three sawhorses holding up the coffin. It was the second day of October, still full daylight and plenty warm, but Sister Camillus had lit three white candles. They were on a tall metal stand near the foot of the coffin. At the other end, a stand held a crucifix. That was what they called it. A crucifix. I didn’t like it, Jesus wearing a crown of thorns, His hands and feet nailed to the cross, and His bare ribs showing. It wasn’t seemly. I wished someone would move that thing but nobody did.

  A few hours before the vigil started, the neighbors showed up in their wagons. That set the dogs barking, and my two brothers had to go out and herd them into the barn. The neighbors came from up and down Galveston Island, and they came wearing black. The women were in their mourning dresses with their corsets pulled extra tight for the occasion. I’d done the same. The men wore suits, and their white collars were starched to stand up even when they took to tugging at them, sweat dribbling down the sides of their faces.

  The neighbor women brought baskets of food filled with platters of shrimp and oysters. They brought pans of cornbread, bowls of purple-hull peas, and more cakes than I had room for on Bernadette’s kitchen table. They talked in low tones – ‘Ain’t it sad?’ ‘Don’t it break your heart?’ – the feathers on their hats bobbing as we put out the food. It was supper time but nobody ate. It didn’t seem right with Oscar standing by the coffin, his green eyes dulled with sorrow. There was no getting away from seeing him, the kitchen being the other half of the front room. Couldn’t keep from seeing the neighbor men, either, them clumped around Oscar. They turned their hats in their hands as they mumbled condolences; Daddy kept pinching the crown in his. My brothers weren’t much better but the married men were the most skittish. Their gazes skipped around until they found their wives. Don’t die, I could see the men think. Don’t leave me with our little ones, me not knowing what to do, me having to give them away or remarry quick. Don’t let me be like Oscar, widowed with a four-year-old boy.

  It was hurtful to watch.

  It didn’t take long for the men to drift away from Oscar and go out to the front veranda. That was where the neighbor children were. The boys sat on the wide-planked floor with their black-stocking legs poked between the railing posts so that their feet could dangle and swing. The little girls sat on the steps that led up to the veranda, their hair in braids and tied with ribbons. I saw them from the front kitchen windows, and I didn’t blame the men and the children for staying outside. There, the breeze whisked away the sweat. Outside, they could look at the sky with its high-riding puffed clouds. The house sat up on five-foot-high stilts and from the veranda, a person could see the rows of tall sand hills that were a quarter of a mile from the front of Bernadette and Oscar’s house. The Gulf of Mexico was on the other side of the sand hills and far off, at the horizon, a trail of steamships and schooners waited to come into Galveston’s port.

  On the veranda, the neighbor men shucked off their high collars and went to the dairy barn, some of them taking their children with them. At the barn, I figured the men did what came natural. They worked. They filled the water troughs, and they cleaned out the stalls. They worked so that Oscar wouldn’t worry overly about his milk cows.

  Likely Oscar wasn’t thinking about nothing else but Bernadette. As Mama said, he wasn’t but a shadow of himself since she took sick a week ago.

  When the vigil started, the Baptists mostly left and went on home. I wanted to do the same; I wanted to breathe air that wasn’t filled up with sadness. But Bernadette had been my friend since she and Oscar got married, and a person didn’t run out on friends.

  Neither would I run out on Oscar. My family had known him since he came to our end of the island. We were practically next-door neighbors, our house being only a mile and a half away. My brothers, Frank T. and Wiley, worked for Oscar and hauled milk to Oscar’s city customers. So I stayed for the vigil, and Mama did, too. Sister Camillus got down on her knees on the braided rug by the coffin, her all swallowed up in nun’s clothes so that only part of her face showed. She had her white rosary beads in her hands. Oscar was there, too, kneeling and holding a black rosary, it looking small in his broad hands that were scarred and nicked from hard work.

  I could hardly look at him. He was peaked pale, the sun washed out of his cheeks. But his necktie was knotted just so, and he was fresh shaved. Down on his knees, he kept his shoulders back and his bearing upright. He stayed that way all through the rosary praying – ‘Hail Mary, full of grace’ – each word sliding into the next. There was no end to that rosary; it called for a prayer for each bead and that thing was one bead after the next. But Oscar stayed steady. Likely he did it for Bernadette. It would hurt her hard to see him slump with sorrow.

  Leastways, Andre didn’t have to suffer through all the praying. The nuns saw to that. The day before Bernadette died, her burning up worse than before with malaria and retching up watery bile, two of the nuns came and took him to St. Mary’s. ‘He shouldn’t be in the house,’ Sister Camillus had told Oscar. ‘It’s worrying Bernadette. She can hear him crying for her.’

  I hadn’t liked them taking him, not one bit. Andre had cried, I wouldn’t say different. He asked for his mama, his little face puckered with puzzlement. But I was there seeing to him while Mama and Sister Camillus took turns nursing Bernadette. I washed his face in the mornings, saying how we had to scrub all them freckles of his. I helped him into his nightshirt at bedtime and made him say his prayers. When I cooked breakfast, dinner, and supper in Bernadette’s kitchen, Andre p
layed under the table with his building blocks. ‘Miss Nan,’ he’d say, his black eyes with long eyelashes fixed on me. ‘I made me a fort. See?’

  ‘Ain’t that something?’ I’d say. When he cried for his mama, wanting to go into the bedroom to see her, I took him to the beach. There, he dug holes in the sand, his four dogs winding around him and dropping sticks for him to throw. When it was about time to go home, me and him picked the yellow sea daisies that grew in the sand hills. They were Bernadette’s favorite. We filled up a canning jar with them and when we got home, I’d knock on the closed bedroom door. If Mama or Sister Camillus said it was a good time, Andre took the flowers to his mama. As sick as she was, her eyes lit up when that little boy with his sun-browned cheeks and stand-up-straight cowlick came into the room.

  That was how it was during the first four days of Bernadette’s sickness. Then she got worse and Andre went to St. Mary’s that was down the beach about a half-mile. St. Mary’s was an orphanage filled from corner to corner with children. The nuns were good to the orphans, I wouldn’t say different. And Bernadette was partial to the nuns. ‘They took me in,’ she said about them. ‘I won’t ever forget what they did for me.’ But it wasn’t the same for Andre. He had a home. I expected Oscar to buck the nuns about taking Andre while Bernadette was sick. Oscar thought the sun rose and set on that little boy, and Andre was the same way about his daddy. But Oscar let the nuns take him.

  That was what ran through my mind during the vigil. Andre at the orphanage, waiting for his daddy to come get him. That vigil went on and on, all them beads to be prayed over. When it finally ended, the Catholics weren’t ready to quit. The funeral mass was the next day at St. Mary’s. The chapel was so crowded with neighbors that the orphans had to sit squashed together. Some city people were there, too, done up in high-quality clothes. The women’s hats were showy with big bows and long feathers, and the men had barbershop shaves. I figured they all were Oscar’s customers, and I didn’t pay them much attention. My mind was on Andre.

  I saw him right off when me, Mama and Daddy, and my brothers came into the chapel before the service started. He was with Oscar in the front row, them two sitting pressed as close to each other as they could get. I could have cried if I was given to doing such. Bernadette’s coffin wasn’t more than a few yards from them.

  Daddy made us sit in back, saying how we weren’t Catholics. Mama didn’t like it. ‘We’re nearly kin,’ she’d whispered.

  ‘Nearly kin ain’t the same as being,’ Daddy whispered back.

  ‘Well,’ Mama said. ‘Maybe.’ She sat down and the hymnsinging started, but I didn’t know the words. Next, the priest showed up and all through the kneeling and praying, I thought how proud Bernadette would be, her little boy being brave, not a peep out of him.

  From the day he was born, she fussed over him. She called him mon cher ’tit chou. That was Cajun talk for my little sweetheart, Bernadette had told me. She was from the swamps over there in Louisiana. But now Andre was a poor motherless child. That was what the neighbor women called him when the service was finally over and we walked together to our wagons and buggies that were parked off to the side of the chapel. Oscar couldn’t raise him alone, they said. No man could. Then somebody said, ‘The nuns’ll take good care of Andre, leastways until Oscar remarries.’

  I kept my mouth shut. The neighbors didn’t know. They weren’t there on the day Bernadette died like I was. I’d been washing her parlor windows, keeping the house up like she would, when Mama came out of the bedroom. ‘Nan,’ she’d said, ‘Bernadette wants to see you.’

  It took everything I had to walk down the hall and into the bedroom. The room had a bad sour smell, Sister Camillus and Oscar sat on either side of the bed, and I hardly knew Bernadette. She laid on her side, slick with feverish sweat and pasty-colored. Her lips were cracked and bloody. She was nothing but skin and bones other than her belly, swelled with the baby she was expecting come Christmas. Oscar got up so I could take his place.

  I took Bernadette’s hand. It was burning hot and her black eyes glittered. ‘I’m here,’ I said, pressing her hand to my cheek. Across from me, Sister Camillus’ brown eyes bored into mine. She didn’t like me, plain as day. Bernadette licked her lips. Then she came right out and told me to look after Andre.

  ‘Now you stop that talk,’ I told her. ‘Ain’t nothing all that wrong with you. Just a little fever, that’s all.’

  Bernadette shook her head. She knew different. The priest had been there that morning. ‘Nan,’ she said. ‘Please.’

  ‘Bernadette,’ Sister Camillus said. ‘Dear.’

  ‘Forgive me, Sister.’ She swallowed hard like her throat wasn’t working right. She said, ‘Please. Nan.’

  ‘You’re going to get better,’ I said. ‘I just know it.’ But Oscar, standing beside me, likely couldn’t take it no more. ‘Promise,’ he said to me, that word coming out hard. ‘Say you will,’ he said. So I did, squeezing out the words, tears in my voice.

  I thought about my promise when we left the chapel. Most of the neighbors went on home – chores were calling – but some of us lined up our buggies and wagons, one after the other, and went up the island to the cemetery in the city. We traveled along the beach road, the tide being low and the sand by the water’s edge packed down hard. To our right, the gulf sparkled like cut glass in the afternoon sun. Me, Mama, and Daddy were crowded up in the buggy while my brothers, Frank T. and Wiley, followed behind us in the wagon. The surf was a soft roar, and we didn’t say nothing, sadness likely wearing us all down.

  The sand crunched under the buggy wheels, and up in the sky, long strings of pelicans floated on currents of air, their wings spread wide. Oscar was partial to pelicans and liked to count them. I hoped that he saw them as he rode with Sister Camillus on the buckboard of the wagon that carried Bernadette. Andre wasn’t with them. He’d been left behind at St. Mary’s; could be somebody thought he’d had enough. When we got to the cemetery and the priest found more to say before Bernadette was lowered into the grave, I hoped Oscar thought about pelicans, all light and airy up in the sky. Maybe they’d make him remember who Bernadette had been before she took sick.

  It’d be easy for him to let the nuns keep Andre. It’d be easy for him to send Andre to his kin up in Ohio. That was where Oscar was from. Most men would do one or the other: a man couldn’t raise a child alone. Most would forget the promise I’d made, me not being kin. But when the priest finally ran out of prayers, when it was all over, the gravediggers waiting under the tree for us to leave, Oscar came over to me.

  ‘I’m bringing Andre home,’ he said. ‘Later today.’

  ‘He’ll be purely glad,’ I said.

  The next morning, well before dawn, I let myself into the dark house and took up caring for Andre.

  CHAPTER ONE

  Dayton, Ohio

  January 1900

  Gossip. Breathless whispers. Circles of women in parlors perched on the edges of settees, the pointed gray tips of their shoes showing from beneath their dark skirts, their wide-brimmed hats casting shadows. Teacups in hand, they leaned close to one another. This was how I imagined them.

  ‘Did you hear?’ they must have said.

  ‘No. What?’

  ‘Catherine Wainwright was seen with Edward Davis. In Columbus. At the theater.’

  ‘Together? So far from home? Just the two of them?’

  ‘Her hand was on his arm.’

  I pictured the women gasping, drawing back, stunned to silence. It was January in Dayton, Ohio. Flames leapt in parlor fireplaces, the burning wood cracked and popped, startling the women. In my mind’s eye, I saw them glance at their wedding bands, thinking of their husbands and then thinking of me, Catherine Wainwright.

  ‘But Edward Davis’ wife?’ someone surely said. ‘Does she know?’

  ‘The doctor had to be called.’

  The women fluttered their hands. They had drawn close again, the circle tightening.

  ‘Poor Alma Davis
,’ they must have said. ‘She’s so very frail.’

  ‘And the children, those two sweet little girls.’

  Whispers swirled, rushing from house to house. My mother came to the Algonquin Hotel where I lived on the fourth floor, her face covered with a black veil. As soon as she stepped into my sitting room, she raised her hand and slapped me. ‘Your cousin’s husband,’ she said. ‘How could you?’

  My cheek stinging, I kept my gaze fixed on her dark blue hat, its ostrich feathers seeming to quiver with outrage.

  She said, ‘Do you know what this is doing to the family? Your uncle is furious. This is his daughter’s life you’re destroying. As if she hasn’t suffered enough. And my husband, the shame is unbearable. No doubt his clients know and as for the clerks, well, one knows how those people can gossip. The humiliation, Catherine. Look at me. Do you know what you have done to your cousin? To me?’

  There was nothing to say to that. My mother said, ‘Do something. Now.’

  Darling Edward, I wrote. I must see you.

  The surge of gossip condemned me. The women, some of whom had been childhood friends, stopped speaking to me. They were the leading citizens; their fathers and husbands were Dayton’s innovators. Their families owned and managed the paper mills, the factories, and the foundries. They were the producers of fine stationery, computing scales, and sewing machines. At the milliner’s, these women lifted their chins and looked past me. At the dressmaker’s, they turned away, lips pressed tight. Although my father had been a designer of bridges, I had not been part of this circle of women for years. I had moved from Dayton when I was eighteen and returned only a year ago. I had not married; I was a pianist and practiced for hours on end. On those occasions when I did join the circles of women for tea or for discussions about literature, I had little to add when conversation turned to domestic matters and to the rearing of children. Now I had given the women of Dayton cause to rise up against me. In mid-January, the first note arrived in my mailbox at the hotel.