The Keepers of the House by Shirley Ann Grau

Author:Shirley Ann Grau [Grau, Shirley Ann]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
ISBN: 978-1-4532-4720-4
Publisher: Open Road Integrated Media LLC
Published: 2012-03-24T16:00:00+00:00

IN the years that followed, John worked harder than ever, building a solid foundation for his political career, building himself a statewide machine. “Going to be better than the one the Longs have in Louisiana,” he told me once.

Of course, he was away more than ever. And once again, the year after my grandfather’s death, I found myself suspecting, checking on him. I couldn’t help it. I had to. Sometimes I fought with myself for hours. I would work frantically on the napkins I was monogramming and I would try not to look at the telephone, so squat and round and white there on the table. But the end was always the same. Biting my lip and shivering with disgust, I would call long distance and nervously tell them the number he’d left with me. The girls in the telephone office soon got to recognize my voice: “How you, Mrs. Tolliver? This is Jenny Martin.” I knew them, of course I did. I knew all the girls—operators, secretaries, clerks—who worked in the white-shingled building across the square from the courthouse. I could see them gossiping between calls: “She keeps up with him, for sure. You suppose she’s got reason?” I hated that. Hated to set them talking about me, to give them grounds for suspicion. But I couldn’t help it. My arm always went weak, and my will betrayed me.

John didn’t say anything for months. Finally, late one night, I reached him at his hotel in New Orleans. I had less to say than usual, even, and he was very tired and you could hear the rasp of irritation in his voice. “Honey, why’d you call?”

You could hear the annoyance and the nervousness and the waspishness in mine too. “Because I get lonesome and afraid when I’m pregnant.”

In the silence my thoughts ran around my head, rattling like marbles: You’re not sure, you’re not sure. …

“I’ll be damned,” he said.

When he came home, he brought me a pearl necklace. “It’s not the best,” he said, “but it’ll do for a while.”

I needn’t have worried. Soon there was the soft bland feeling of gestation, as my body and I settled down to the comfortable work of building another shape, bone by bone, little flecks of calcium forming, tissue growing, cell by cell, life pouring in through the cord.

I was placid and lazy, and John took charge of the remodeling of my grandfather’s house. He brought an architect from New Orleans and the two of them worked for months over the plans. There was plenty of money now, and John used it well. I’d never known it was such an imposing house. John had been clever enough to go back to the original style, the massive solid farmhouse—of the sort that preceded the rage for Greek Revival. It was heavy and rather African, but it was beautiful. They’d also taken off most of the wings and sheds that had grown on it like mushrooms or barnacles over the generations. And they had cleared away the woods that pressed on it and crept up to it.

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