My mother would have loved a dinner like this, I thought, as I sipped on my wine, hoping in vain that the alcohol might help soothe my frantic nerves, my fears that the trembling of my heart was a portent, an omen of terrible things to come.
She would have been glittering and luminous, she would have had the men hanging off her every word, the women squirming with envy and not a little awe—at least until the evening curdled, and my father provoked her drunken jealousy, so that she and he would fling barbs like silver knives across the table.
He liked to bring up her island beginnings in company, as if it were a trump card, mockingly naming her a savage, describing how he had found her in some whitewashed shack with no electricity or running water—despite everyone knowing that she had grown up in a grand plantation house—or running along the beach, a wild little thing with no corset or shoes.
I hated it. I hated it too when they continued their arguments in the room underneath mine after the guests had all gone home, his voice scornful, hers desperate, and then the way the sounds would change to grunts and moans and the bed shifting on its legs.
My hothouse flower, he would call her, my Eve in the jungle, my innocent, my wild beauty.
My name is Heloise, she would reply. Use my name, you coward.
Coward, me? To take such a wild wife as you? he would say and then I would hear her slap him and him laugh and say, See? See?
You’ve cursed me, you witch, my father liked to declare—fondly or hatefully, depending on his mood—as the two of them sparred with words in the drawing room, or the dining room, or in the ballroom with the doors flung open as the summer sun heated the world to blazing.
No, my mother would spit back, it’s you who has cursed me, who has trapped me here in this awful house. Why not just kill me? she would say, holding her arms out wide. Why not stuff me like one of your exotic animals and be done with it, place me in some forgotten room, silent and dutiful and forever young?
What a mad thing to say, he would drawl in response, and she would either fly at him with her nails or run from him, fleeing along the corridors, up the stairs, in and out of rooms, looking for somewhere safe to hide; looking, I thought now, for the door that would lead her back home, back to a time before she married my father, before she had me, before she ever stepped foot over the threshold of Lockwood Manor.