And With One Nod

by Ruth Margaret Pardee

The chair had been there since Tom’s grandfather had carved it when Tom was just a boy, over forty years ago. It sat in the rickety barn-turned-hovel where he lived, its carefully woven seat strained from generations of supporting the tired men. Tom let out a low groan as he collapsed into its worn wicker, rubbing his back with one hand and unlacing his shoes with the other.

He pulled off the malleable leather shoes. The brown laces were worn and frayed, and Tom noticed his socks each had a hole through the bottom. His feet were cold against the wood floor, soaking in the frigid air.

Tom reached for the cherry-wood box by his easel. He rested it gently on his lap, and opened the lid as a pirate would a chest of gold. The crushed tubes of amethyst, chartreuse, persimmon glinted in Tom’s eyes. Azure. Sienna. Cerulean. He pinched and squeezed out the last drops of color from the tubes, and began to lay out a scene with strokes of his splintered brush with bristles like twigs. Each night the paints would unfurl themselves into a setting sun, a Mediterranean seaside, an urban sideway. Always a foreign scene, spun from Tom’s head as a spider spins silk. Always a scene far away from where he sat, far from Groving Park.

Tom was born at Groving Park forty-three years ago, in this – could you call it a house? As a child, he would watch his mother Harriet crane over the sink with her washboard, and he would peer out the small window to see his father carefully pruning the topiaries lining the grand walkway to the manor. At the end of a hot day, his father would walk through the door with his feet dragging slightly, his hair intertwined with bits of shrubbery. Tom would run up, giggling and reaching for his father’s affection, and all he’d get in return was a muttered, “Wait ‘til you pull the weeds and trim the grass everyday. Just wait.”

His father had taken care of the estate his entire life, as had his father’s father, and his father’s father’s father. And the Pateau family had always inhabited the great mansion at the top of the hill. The Pateaus had owned the mansion, the woods to the east, and the peninsula comprising of Groving Park since anyone could remember. The Hawley family took care of the sloping hillside, the Pateau family rested their feet on upholstered ottomans. That was how it was.

This generation was no different; Tom Hawley trimmed the green lawns and pulled up the spindle weeds every day, under the slanted nose of Cole Pateau. When Cole’s father had died nine years ago, Cole was abruptly brought back from the bustle of luxurious Parisian life to inhabit the mansion and manage the servants. His days at Groving Park were spent intricately monitoring the upkeep of the estate, ensuring all three forks and knives were properly in place at his setting for dinner each night, checking to make sure his sheet corners were creased into the mahogany bed frame. Cole would pay particular attention to Tom, watching him from the large sheet of glass making up the front room window. He would stand with polished feet splayed and hands behind his back, surveying Tom’s work. Tom would hear a slight rap at the window and look up to see Cole with a curled finger, pointing out the single twig that had fallen onto the newly mowed lawn. The sound made him grit his teeth, his body tense as he would turn and give the smallest nod towards the glass to indicate he saw the infraction.

* * *

Tom crouched on hands and feet by the side of the mansion. Its wide cream planks stretched up and up, creating a cliff at whose base Tom worked. He shivered as the cold penetrated his thin jacket, working in the dark shadow of the mansion. He fumbled with the tiny seeds in his swollen fingertips, planting the nasturtium. Cole did not know they were a weed and each year he would lavish over the beautiful flowers at the foot of the house while Tom would politely nod back. It was his one chance a year to make Cole a fool, even if he was the only one to know it.

As he leaned over to pick up the trowel, he heard a chirping laughter coming from down the hillside. Never had he heard this bright voice, this twinkle of spirit, and never here at Groving Park. He turned and observed a young girl, just the height where the accompanying housekeeper could no longer carry her. The girl had titian hair, slightly curly, streaming behind her in the powerful wind. She walked determinedly, bent at an angle to the hillside, slightly ahead of her nanny. Her twig legs peeked out from beneath the fur trim of her long wool coat which she clutched around herself with both hands, keeping her body warm as the outside blustered around her. She marched to the base of the house, and Tom quickly looked back down at his work as she approached.

“Hello,” she said as she reached to open the mightily thick front door. Tom, so surprised to have been addressed while not being given an order, reached for words but choked. “H-hello,” he finally managed to cough out, just as the door was shutting behind the wisp of titian hair.

The arrival of Cole’s daughter shocked the small staff of the estate. The maids had long ago whispered giddily about his secret mistress he’d lavished with gifts when he had lived in Paris. They had spread rumors of the daughter he had in the city, but everyone including the maids themselves had believed them to be just that - rumors. Nevertheless here she was, come to live at the mansion with her father while her mother rode on the backs of elephants in India.

Felicity quickly made herself known at Groving Park. She lay in the maids’ parlor and gossiped with them, while helping them to dust (as high as her nine-year-old arms could reach). She leaned out the window each morning to thank the farmer who brought the milk and butter. She made flowers spring up behind her and welcoming arms reach out ahead of her.

* * *

Tom had been crouching for too long. He straightened his back, and looked at the straight row of planted beans in the soil behind him. He was out of seeds. Standing up, he trudged up the hill along the edge of the topiaries away from the main path. He wiped the dirt from his shoes and stepped into the servant’s entrance. As soon as Tom entered the main hallway, he heard showering from the second floor, “Felicity! I’ve told you, that coat was a gift and costs more money than you’ve ever seen at once! Give it to me!” The next second, the young girl came pounding down the spiral stairs two at a time, the long coat almost tripping her. She was a blur passing Tom, and Cole appeared panting at the top of the stairs.

“Tom?” Cole said calmly, composing himself at the sight of the gardener.

“Sir, I’m out of butterbeans.”

“You’re out of butterbeans?! Dear God, I shall call the carriage immediately! Clara, bring the horses round, we must run to Wilshire, we are out of butterbeans!” Tom’s insides boiled. He looked into the pinched face and coiffed hair of his master, the man who could tell him when to breathe, sleep, eat, when to plant butterbeans.

“Sir, the rains are coming, the beans must be planted before - ”

“Tom, tell Clara to get more when she goes to town for cloth to make a dress for Felicity. Do not come to me with matters like this.” Cole said these last words with such determination and finality he turned around before Tom had responded.

“Nanny Marie is taking me to Wilshire this afternoon for new gloves. Daddy, we can stop and buy some today in town.” Felicity had reappeared around the corner of the hallway, standing squarely in the entrance arch.

“No, no, Tom can wait for his beans, and you must be home early tonight to study your German. No time for beans today.”

“I will bring them to you tonight Tom,” Felicity said kindly. She gave her father a cool look, her eyes slivered almonds, daring him to question her. Cole responded while still gazing into his daughter’s face,

“Well, um, yes, I suppose today is the best day after all. Felicity, be sure to tell Marie to get beans today, don’t forget.” Felicity smiled at Tom from beneath her father’s flopping lapels clutched at her pink cheek bones. Tom smiled back thankfully at the young girl, and reached behind him for the servant’s door handle.

* * *

That evening Tom finished the painting. A young man dressed in a pressed suit, charcoal grey, wandering mindlessly through an unnamed city: cream, dark brown, umber, copper. His hands were in his pockets, his eyes looking up to the sky. Tom stepped back to observe his work, his eyes wide, his brush tip resting on his lower lip. His brow furrowed. Terra cotta…here. Better.

Tom heard a gentle tap on the door. “Yes?” he foolishly asked the door, wondering what would tap on it. The door swung aside and Felicity entered his shabby home. She stood silhouetted against the dark outside, carrying a large box which obscured her face. Tom quickly dropped the brush on the table and grabbed the box away from the girl. It was lighter than he expected, not more than two-thirds full.

“The maids were cleaning out the servant quarters. Spring cleaning. They found this box labeled ‘Tom’, and I said I’d bring it to you. What is it?” Felicity asked.

Tom lay the box on the table, peering at the side which indeed had ‘TOM’ printed in large letters across one side. He reached in and pulled out the item on top – a child’s workbook. He reached in again and sure enough extracted a bottle of ink and a thick quill large enough for a small child to grasp. Tom’s memory gasped, recalling the old school book his mother had bought him and in which she had taught him to print the alphabet. He opened the paper cover, supporting the fragile binding, to see straight rows of A’s followed by pages of B’s and then C’s. Along the margins, Tom saw little sketches. A girl with a flower. His mother entering their house. His father with a shovel. Flipping through the pages, he could see the letters disappear around H, and all that was left were pages and pages of outlines, ink drawings which had dripped from Tom’s boyish mind so many years ago.

“What is in the box?” Felicity repeated.

“My childhood,” Tom answered in a whisper.

Tom and Felicity sat at the splintering table, the lamp flooding the small box with light. The table lay strewn with a short woolen cap his mother had knit him, a set of pastels worn to grubby points, a checkered ball, a cloth doll a smiling maid had sewn when he was just a boy. Tom had pulled out each item one by one from the box, explaining its significance to an enthralled Felicity before reaching for the next. At last the box appeared empty, and his cracked hand groped against the wooden bottom to check. He patted down each corner when his fingertips grazed a sharp paper corner. Tom lifted the cream envelope to his eyes and saw the frayed edge, already once ripped apart by eager hands. He pulled out the folded parchment, and spread the spindle letters out on the table.

Richard,

This is my last. I will die before the week is out, although the doctors continue to force me to drink the serum which stings as it goes down. I told Cole. He must know who his mother truly is, where he truly comes from. Now it is your turn.

Don’t come see me. I’ll be happy knowing I have your love contained in your letters, always under my pillow while I sleep evermore.

-H.H.

Tom’s mind whirled and clicked, gears working ferociously, too fast too fast. H.H. And Richard, but surely not Richard Pateau? And Cole, He must know who his mother truly is? H.H. Harriet Hawley. Richard Pateau. H.H. Cole.

“Tom? What is it? Tom?”

He sat back against the chair and gave Felicity a glazed look as though looking through her to his childhood. His mother getting distracted from her housework to stare and smile out the window to the mansion above. His father casting dark looks at the master when he would pass.

“Read it to me,” Felicity softly interrupted.

When he had finished, Felicity asked, “But what does she mean, ‘I have your love contained in the letters, always under my pillow?’ ”

His brow furrowed. He remembered being a boy, playing with the doll by his parent’s bed, playing with the loose floor-board. The old hardwood had felt feeble to his young hands, and he had soon learned the board could be pried open with tiny fingers. It was his favorite hiding place. And just beneath where his mother lay her head to sleep after a long day of washing.

Tom leapt from the table, the wicker chair clattering onto the wood floor beneath as Tom’s hammering feet created ripples in the silence. He ripped through the bedroom door, down on hands and knees, crawling like an infant towards the iron bed. His leathered hands fumbled with the weak board, grasping and pulling.

“Here Tom.” Felicity reached forward and her delicate fingers fit into the crevice between the two boards. She pulled up, and… A box. Metal, ugly, rusty. Tom reached into the dark opening, and laid the box beside him on the floor, pulling on the lid. With the sound of a forgotten vault opening, the lid came off. Thick vanilla parchment, creased, a wax seal with a hooked P on several frayed edges. Sturdy lettering, few flourishes, dripping ink.

Harriet,

How I did enjoy our meeting beside the oak grove yesterday. You were so very sweet to remember how much I like your mother’s tea cake recipe, and to bring me a fresh batch! You are, my dear, simply extraordinary…

Harriet,

Your eyes sing to me when we sit on the bench beneath the moonlight. How I could have sat there all evening, just to feel you wrapped at my side…

Harriet, …

Tom read page after page. His eyes grew moist from the strain of reading the small print, from the exhaustion of understanding his mother’s affair. Hearing only one side, Richard’s side, he itched to read his mother’s responses to each passionate letter. He remembered how she would gaze bewitched out the window when Tom was young, how she would run special errands into town for “Just some things for the manor.” She’d always supplied the best reasons for her absence, reasons not to be questioned.

“So your mother, and my grandfather? They are my father’s parents? But why didn’t he tell you if he knew?”

The air outside had grown crisp, the dark air a rich black.

“He didn’t want me to know.”

Tom turned over the final envelope. His mother had had an affair with Richard Pateau for almost all of his life, and somehow he had never known. His mind was skipping beats, jumping from the affair to the truth. The truth. The letters had revealed the truth, as much as Tom wanted it to jump back inside its shell. But once he knew he could never unknow. Harriet and Richard’s wife had become pregnant within a month of one another. Harriet bore her healthy boy, a sturdy infant with pink cheeks and a bubbling hiccup. Tom could just remember his five year old self gazing transfixed at his new brother. Richard’s wife died a week later in labor, producing a child yellow at birth, frail, weak, with a wheezing cough at best. And the letters Tom read showed clearly how Harriet had convinced Richard, shown him that his only chance to have an heir would be to take the healthy one. The maids knew. Even Harriet’s husband knew. But Tom was too young to catch on. The switch was made quietly, several nights after the frail baby’s birth. And as the healthy baby Pateau was christened Cole in a magnificent ceremony at the Wilshire cathedral, the frail baby died wrapped in Harriet’s sleeping arms.

“Are you upset with Daddy?” Tom didn’t know how to tell the child.

“No Felicity, I’ve known your daddy for so long and…You should get back home, your German remember,” Tom whispered as he gave her a withered look. She returned with a skeptical gaze, but retreated, shutting the door quietly behind her.
Tom rocked, his heels pinched against the cold floor-boards, his useless jacket hanging off his shoulders. He pulled it off, wrapping the itchy cloth around his torso and fell asleep in a crouched ball beside his mother’s bed.

* * *

Tom awoke to a tiny hand shaking his shoulder.

“Tom. Tom!”

He sat up, startled, and saw Felicity crouching beside his huddled shape. The dusty sunlight made fanning spirals through the window.

“Tom, we have to find what your mother wrote.”

“No, Felicity, no, this affair is over, we must put these letters back and forget what we can. There is nothing to be done about it.”

“Did he write where he kept her letters?” Felicity charged on, ignoring Tom’s response.

Many times in Richard’s responses he wrote how he treasured her detailed letters, how he kept every one and longed for the next. He had revealed his secret stash, contained under the false bottom of his desk drawer. Tom could picture the desk well, the ornate legs and the Pateau family crest in gold upon the desktop. He knew this very desk was the most treasured heirloom of the family, always kept in the master bedroom at Groving Park. Tom had to know too.

“I’ll need your help to get them.”

Felicity took the lead and leapt up the marble stairs. She bent her body in a right angle to pull the heavy door open and whisked Tom inside. The main entrance was more grand than he had remembered, with the spiral staircase beckoning him to the treasure. Felicity darted over each plush step, with Tom running his hand along the smooth banister parallel to the curve of the stair’s spine. By the time he peered around the lacquered doorframe, Felicity’s head was all that could be seen bobbing as she delved deep within the infamous heirloom desk.

Hidden beneath the drawer, secret to all but you and me.

“Felicity, see if there is a piece of wood loose in the bottom drawer – Yes there, is it loose?”

With a final popping sound, the inlaid bottom of the drawer came free. Felicity grasped it with two hands, hoisting the heavy wood above her head as her eyes shone and she smiled to Tom, triumphant with her achievement. As Tom watched her eyes, he saw them go from triumphant and creased in a smile, to cold and hard, and he saw her lower the board to her lap.

“Tom. Felicity.”

Tom pivoted without a sound to see Cole standing close behind, feet splayed, hands behind his back and looking down his hooked nose at the two of them. Tom saw Cole’s nose redden, and saw the nostrils edge away from each other as a bull flares before a red flag.

“This desk is the oldest known artifact from the Pateau family line. Do either of you understand what that means? This desk has been here longer than either of you can even remember, even longer than when your pathetic family arrived to work for our great family name! Our crest is on the desk, doesn’t that mean anything to you? Felicity! Put. Down. The. Drawer…Now.”

In an instant, Tom heard the carved wood clatter to the floor as Felicity let it go, reaching her hands instead into the depths of the drawer up to her elbows. Before he could pause to think, he reached out both hands. Cole lunged at his daughter, arms outstretched and tails flapping behind him as he grabbed her by both shoulders. Tom reached out, and caught the sailing packet of cream envelopes and spindle letters, tied with twine in a thick bundle. He weighed them in his arms, clearly his mother’s writing, hoping her scent maybe still lingered too. He turned the package over in his arms, noticing the bottom letter was loose with no envelope. His mother’s writing.

Tom should know who his father is. I’ve done my part, I’ve told Cole I’m his mother and you’re Tom’s father. Now tell Tom. He deserves to know.

Cole was now gazing up from his grip on Felicity, both faces looking towards Tom.

As the eldest son, Tom must know he is the heir to Groving Park.

The heir to Groving Park.

The heir.

Tom’s eyes zoomed in on Cole’s. All he felt was a direct target at Cole, Tom’s unblinking, unwavering stare fixed on his black eyes.

“The heir to Groving Park… You knew. You knew.” He glanced towards Felicity. Her eyes sparkled, and her head bowed the tiniest fraction. And with one nod, she assured Tom of what he must do.

“You left when my mother died. No. When our mother died. You thought she told me, you thought I would no longer be the grounds keeper. But when your – our – father died you were summoned back here, and you found me still trimming the topiaries, still planting the butterbeans. So you were silent, and you punished me. And Mother thought you were the strong child.”

He felt his heart open, he felt a new tightness in his chest, a pulse at his temple. The gears in his head churned and clicked, and arrived at a new stop. Tom knew suddenly he was no longer a gardener. He knew he could no longer stay in this prison of a life, he could do what his paintings had always hinted. His entire body smiled, and he looked to Felicity. Her eyes sparkled back at him. The twinkle in her eye told him she could manage here without him.

He could hear Cole stamping his feet and bellowing but he couldn’t hear the words. Without a sound, Tom turned on his heels. He barreled down the red staircase. Crimson. He went shoe over shoe pounding on the earth. Mahogany. Auburn. He peeled open the door to his barn-turned-hovel, stepped over the overturned chair to the table, gathered his necessities under his arm, and marched out the door. The sunset greeted him for his last view of Groving Park. Salmon. Mauve. Fuchsia. Ruby.

Tom walked down the lawn to the road to Wilshire, his cherry-wood box secured under his arm, and his face stretched into its first real smile. Now to find his paintings.