Owen Jameson and Camellia Dupuis would never know when this “energy,” this “force” that alienated them from the town, started. Nor were they entirely sure at first that they both were targeted. Camellia had found a friend in Owen—and, since orphaned at seven, it was the first friend she had ever had. Still, she was too carefree to see that it was dangerous to have a male friend—a rich one, too, and one she could easily be seen to love.
She did not recognize this as others did, or even consider it as others did. Not with the man who had saved her husband.
Her character was such that if she didn’t think disgrace, why should they?
Only a little later did she realize the much more volatile truth. She found this out when she went to ask a woman on her street why she forbade her child to see Camellia after school.
The woman came outside, closed the briny half-wrecked door, and coughing in the dark, cold air said: “Yer fuckin’ him, arncha?” In such a hilarious anointing of blame that Camellia laughed.
Camellia was finally hit with the realization of how her own grace was treated by others.
“Tell yer child to come over anytime,” she said, still managing a smile. “We get along so well—you see I’m not much more than a big kid myself.”
There was a statuette at the house, bought by Will, of The Kiss by Rodin. It was from Dante’s Inferno; adulterous lovers, Francesca and Paulo, kissing at the gates of hell. Though Will had not known what the statuette actually represented, Owen did. And he knew that he and Camellia were branded by a kiss.
It was a silly moment, his frivolous kiss.
From this kiss a liberty had been taken, not by them but by certain people in town who by December of 1946 wanted or needed them for scandal. It was such a lively thing after the war.
That Owen bore men up to the Good Friday without his Push Reggie Glidden, was all the town needed to feel rumor warranted.
That Reggie had married Camellia was looked upon as a crudity marrying a child. It was in fact hilarious, and showed the Browers for who they were.
Looking back, one might say who better than Camellia, who more than anyone else had tried to maintain her equilibrium despite her father and her mother. Who had tried to keep her uncle Sterling out of jail, and who had married Reggie hoping for a happy life, or at least a life without trouble.
Now people were turning their gaze upon her.
Almost every night that fall, Uncle Sterling would be waiting for money. She told him that Owen was her friend—and that Reggie would come home because she prayed for him to do so.
“Do you really pray?” Sterling would ask, “or do you just go up to church for show because of Les and Trudy?” (her father and mother).
“Oh yes—I tell you, I go to church—and I do pray—I say an Our Father and multiple Hail Marys—for I want my man back home safe.”
“Ahhh—your man at home,” Sterling would say, raising his eyes in false and cunning intrigue.
Over the dim, longing, guttered candles she prayed, as her great-grandmother had done in the same spot a century before, her head bowed, her hands folded like a child at confirmation, as the night crept silently on.
But after a while, she realized she couldn’t say anything to Sterling because he was taking it wrong and telling people everything she said.
She became sickly looking and had weak spells after this. Her whole idea of what was happening changed.
So she tried then not to speak to Owen. But by mid-December things were bound in one direction.
The cave, one of Lula’s Steadfast Few wrote her in a Christmas card. It happened at the cave—you know certain women go there to wait for lovers—that is why her mother was killed, because of Byron Jameson—well, like mother like daughter. A certain soldier went there to wait for a woman—that that woman was your best friend and that you were betrothed to the soldier makes it all the more mean. And makes us all so angry.
Every sentiment recorded in this letter was a lie, even the idea that Lula’s friends, who no longer visited her, were angry. Yet Lula had nothing else to hold on to. And she believed it entirely at least for the moment, even though she herself had started it.