Anna and I snuck off the day before her wedding, or “Daddy’s wedding,” as Anna liked to call it, since our father had been itching for her to marry Davis Cummings since the summer she’d turned eighteen.
Davis’ family had countless acres of land that reached nearly to the Mississippi, with rows of vines that seamed the dirt and stretched across rolling hillsides as far as the eye could see. Part of it had once been ours before Granddad Joseph sold off most of Herman Morgan’s original hundred acres during hard times. I’d heard Mother say more than once that Granddad had never forgiven himself, and I knew my daddy’s goal in life was to get it all back if he could.
“That soil’s the most fecund in the county,” my father had remarked, “more fertile than Helen von Hagen,” which made my mother laugh huskily. Everyone in town knew Helen was the typical farmer’s daughter, a regular baby-machine. She had six children by two different daddies, and she was only twenty-three. I was twenty-one—the same age as Anna’s groom—and not long out of teacher’s college, but Daddy hadn’t yet tried to marry me off, maybe because my looks didn’t give him as much to bargain with.
Lucky me.
“It’s a good match, Beatrice,” I caught him telling my mother as I paused by the door to his study. “They’ll have a wonderful life, I do believe it. And half the Cummings plot belongs to Anna as much as to Davis so this marriage means returning it to our family. It would please Joseph beyond end, knowing that one day it’ll pass down to Anna’s children.”
“I’ve no doubt my father would appreciate reclaiming Herman’s stake, but does she love the boy?” Mother asked to my surprise, since feelings were a subject little discussed in our house. “Davis is certainly charming, but I’m not convinced she’s as infatuated with him as he is with her.”
“Good grief, love will come if it hasn’t already! Besides, Archibald thinks it’s high time his son settled down, and Davis is quite taken with her, as any young man would be. Anna’s the prettiest girl in Blue Hills,” Daddy replied without really answering her question. “They belong together,” he added decisively and slapped his hand on his desk, as though to say and that, my dear, is that.
It effectively ended their conversation, and I drifted away from the study door so as not to be caught eavesdropping.
For an instant, I’d considered telling Anna what I’d overheard; but then I quickly changed my mind. If there was one thing living in a small town had taught me, it was when to keep my mouth shut. So much was riding on Anna’s marriage that I could cause nothing but harm if I were to interfere in any fashion. Daddy would have never forgiven me. I realized, too, how shrewd our father was. He did everything for a reason, and this wedding was no exception. He had a head for business and had learned well from Joseph Morgan, who’d taken Daddy under his wing the moment he and my mother had wed. My granddad had taught my father the ins and outs of growing grapes and drilled horror stories into his head—into all of our heads—about the dry years of Prohibition, when every winery in the state had been shut down, which killed off some vineyards entirely. Daddy liked to remind us how heartbreaking it had been for Joseph to parcel off the land, which he’d wisely chosen to do instead of risking starvation for his family.
“It takes great inner strength to learn to swim when you’re sinking,” my father liked to lecture us. “A weaker man would have given up.”
While Joseph Morgan had firmly held on to twenty acres, enough to stay in the wine trade on a much smaller scale, I knew my father was anxious to prove himself and bring that lost land back into the fold. Anna’s union with Davis would do just that.
Only getting Anna and Davis together had not been so easy.
My sister had never lacked for beaus. Even in pigtails and pinafores, she’d had boys hovering around her. I likened her to a flower with spectacular nectar, and they were the greedy honeybees. By the time she started high school, they swarmed incessantly. When she tired of one, another would start courting until he bored her, too. It wasn’t until the June before her senior year that our father began playing his hand; perhaps not very subtly, but cleverly nonetheless. The Cummings family suddenly seemed ever-present, invited to the Victorian for each backyard barbecue, Fourth of July picnic, and marshmallow roast.
As I was less in the midst of things and more on the sidelines, I knew from observing that Davis had an eye for Anna. You could see it in his face every time he looked at her. Only my father must have taken him aside and instructed him on wooing my sister, as he didn’t fawn over her as the other boys were wont to do. He kept his distance, chatting up other young women, talking business with the men, and generally avoiding Anna like the plague until my sister couldn’t bear it.
Before the summer ended, she set her sights on Davis Cummings and, like every boy she’d ever coveted, she had him twisted ’round her little finger before anyone could say, “Boo!” By the fall, she wore his Sigma Chi pin on her sweater, and Mother started bringing up hope chests and trousseaus. Father was over the moon when Davis asked if he might take Anna’s hand in marriage, something that happened one night while I was home. Mother had oh-so-conveniently dragged Anna to a lecture at the library in Ste. Genevieve while I begged off to grade papers. When the doorbell rang, it was Davis, looking decidedly nervous. Father barely took the time to shake the young man’s hand before dragging him into the study, where they remained for nearly half an hour before the doors banged wide-open. Daddy shouted at me to “bring that bottle of forty-year-old brandy, Evie, we’re celebrating!” Although he didn’t offer me a glass. When Davis finally left after a cigar and a snifter, my father followed him out onto the porch, patting him on the back so effusively I was surprised young Mr. Cummings didn’t go flying down the steps.
“This is a big day for us, String Bean,” he told me and gave my own back a pat.
“A big day indeed.”
Unfortunately, when Davis actually proposed to Anna, she wasn’t near as bowled over as Daddy.
“You told him what?” my father said the next evening at dinner when Anna admitted she hadn’t given Davis an answer to his Very Important Question. “What’s wrong with you, Annabelle?” he’d demanded, the veins in his forehead pulsing; his eyes bulging from their sockets. “Of course you’ll say yes!”
“What’s wrong with taking the time to make up my mind? Maybe I’m too young to get married. Maybe I have things I’d like to do first,” my sister had countered, her nostrils flaring, and she’d tossed her napkin on the table. “It’s my life, isn’t it?”
“For the moment,” Daddy had murmured and smoothed the hair back from his brow to calm himself. Then he leaned over his plate and pointed a finger at her, telling her in no uncertain terms, “But if you blow this, Annabelle, your life might become very unpleasant and very brief indeed.”
To which Anna had glared at Daddy and said very calmly, “Sometimes I think you have no heart at all.” Then she glanced at Mother, burst into tears, and fled the table, howling as she ran upstairs to slam her bedroom door.
I waited past dark until the house had calmed down—or rather, until Mother had calmed down both my father and Anna—and then I slipped into Anna’s bedroom and crawled beneath her covers. “Are you all right?” I asked, and she had sighed, rolling onto her back.
“Will there ever be a time, do you think, when we live our lives for ourselves and not for other people?” she said by way of reply, and I told her I couldn’t answer.
I asked her if she loved Davis, and she was evasive. “He’s a small-town boy beneath his spit and polish. He may have gone to Italy after his college graduation, but only to visit the wineries his father does business with, to see their presses and to sniff the oak barrels in their cellars. He didn’t even care to see Rome or Venice, can you imagine? How could he not toss a coin in the Trevi Fountain or gawk at Michelangelo’s Sistine Chapel?”
Things, I knew, that Anna desperately wanted to do.
“He’s a vintner,” I reminded her, “from a family of vintners. He sounds sensible to me, more than I gave him credit for.” I’d always assumed Davis Cummings was merely a spoiled boy raised with the proverbial silver spoon in his mouth.
“Sensible?” Anna snorted and rolled away, turning her back to me. “Yes, you would find that a winning trait, wouldn’t you, Evie?”
The next day, when I returned home after a long day in the classroom, I found Anna emerging from my father’s study, fingering my grandmother Charlotte’s precious pearls around her throat.
Mother and Daddy came out shortly after, and I saw the tightness on her face and the smile on his.
It was done. My sister had agreed to a spring wedding.
From that point forward, the house was in a constant tizzy, filled with visiting relatives, seamstresses, and parcels stacked from floor to ceiling.
The day before the ceremony, Anna came to my room a few hours after breakfast, told me to grab my purse and coat, and put a finger to her lips, saying, “Don’t tell a soul, Evie, but we’re running away for a spell. If I don’t, I swear I’ll go stark raving mad.”
How could I resist such an invitation?
We slipped out of the house and drove into Ste. Genevieve, a quaint river town—and the county seat—not far south, which had a long and storied French past.
We took tea at the Southern Hotel on Third Street before exploring several nearby shops, including a confectioner’s and a perfumery, until Anna drifted toward a corner store with purple drapes inside the plate-glass windows.
“What kind of place is this?” she asked, dark brows knitted above her eyes, too curious to resist. Before I knew it, she headed inside, setting a bell over the door to madly tinkling.
I dove in after her, though my eyes took a bit to adjust to the dim. Only a single light fixture hovered above our heads with pale bulbs that seemed ready to flicker out at any instant.
“Bienvenue, mamselles,” an olive-skinned woman greeted us and beckoned us in. She had long, inky hair woven with ribbons and dark eyes lined with kohl. She looked as I imagined a Gypsy would. “I have lovely vintage baubles I carried with me all the way from Paris. Please, take a look,” she said, watching us as we tucked kidskin gloves in our pockets and fingered a table filled with silk scarves.
Anna wandered over to a display rack swollen with hats of all ilk, many that had surely seen better days. From a knobby arm, she snatched a wide-brimmed bonnet bound by a faded pink ribbon and placed it atop her dark hair, batting her lashes and vamping it up. “Evie,” she said, “aren’t I the spitting image of Audrey Hepburn? All I need are big sunglasses and Cary Grant.”
“This is silly,” I said, putting aside a fan with molting peacock feathers, because I had a bad feeling about the place and the woman whose gaze had never left Anna’s face from the moment we’d walked in. Not that I wasn’t used to people staring at my sister, but this was the first time it had happened that I’d felt a shiver scurry up my spine. “Let’s go, all right? Mother will be wondering where we are besides, with the rehearsal and dinner a few hours away.”
“My God, Evelyn! Stop being so excruciatingly responsible for five minutes, will you?” Anna hissed. “We have plenty of time before we need to get home to change.”
The Gypsy’s ears pricked at the mention. “So you are about to marry?” she asked my sister, her curiosity reflected in the arch of her thin eyebrows. “Is it soon then?”
“Tomorrow.” Anna expelled a weighty sigh as she removed the hat and returned it to its hook.
“You do not find him appealing?” the Gypsy asked.
“Oh, he’s handsome enough,” my sister said with a shrug, “but shouldn’t the earth move and the stars explode when I’m with him? If it were all that, maybe I wouldn’t feel like I’m being traded for a few acres of grapes.”
“Annabelle!” I couldn’t believe she’d voiced such a thing aloud, particularly to a total stranger.
“I see.” The woman ignored me, her focus on Anna.
Again, I urged, “Let’s go, please.”
My sister pursed her lips and refused to look at me.
Something was happening between the two of them. I recognized it even if Anna couldn’t. Whatever the Gypsy had in mind, I wanted no part of it.
“Come on.” I caught my sister’s arm, spurring her toward the door despite her dragging feet, but the shopkeeper interceded, calling out and stopping Anna in her tracks.
“Wait, please, ma pauvre. I have something very special for you,” the woman said, lowering her throaty voice as though sharing a secret. “You cannot leave until you see it.”
“Something special?” my sister said, perking up.
I let out an impatient snort, glaring at her. But she didn’t seem to notice.
“Yes, please.” Anna’s smile returned, and she jerked away from me. “Surely, it can’t hurt just to look.”
“You will not be disappointed.” The Gypsy smiled at Anna before she disappeared into the back room. Minutes after, she emerged with a sleek black dress that shimmered oddly in the electric lights. “It is very pretty, no?”
“Oh, yes.” Anna instantly reached for it. She gazed at it, unblinking, completely mesmerized. “It’s quite beautiful.”
“And very, very rare,” the woman insisted. Then she started talking in her accented voice, mesmerizing in itself, explaining that the dress was made from the silk of spiders found only in Madagascar and that the spiders had to be watched as they wove, for fear they’d devour one another.
Oh, boy, tell me another one, I thought and snorted.
“Enough,” I said. I had no patience for such foolishness.
But Anna didn’t respond. She merely stared at the dress, hypnotized, and the woman went on as if I’d never interrupted.
“The silk the spiders spun was once golden, but the first owner of the dress believed it was cursed and tried to destroy it by burning. It merely turned the silk as black as pitch.”
Ha! I sniffed, thinking that was the silliest thing I’d ever heard. Anna stroked the fabric, which glistened diamond-like beneath her fingers, and I saw goose bumps rise on her arms, lifting the downy hairs.
The Gypsy woman smiled, well aware that she had Anna hooked. “The dress will make happen what is meant to be. Once you see your fate, you can never go back.”
“So it’s like a crystal ball,” Anna said softly, but the Gypsy shook her dark head, ribbons rustling.
“It is destiny,” she corrected.
“Either way it’s magic,” my sister decided, enthralled, and I nudged her, leaning in to whisper, “You don’t believe this fortune-telling bunk, do you?”
But she already had her fingers in her purse, digging out her billfold, more than willing to pay whatever price the Gypsy asked. I could tell that she wanted the dress, and nothing I could say would change her mind.
I rolled my eyes, thinking how gullible she was. She hadn’t even tried it on. It might hang on her tiny body like a potato sack. Part of me wished that it would.
She bought it then and there and decided she’d wear it that night to the rehearsal dinner, forsaking the cream-colored gown with the sweetheart neckline Mother had bought her during a pre-wedding shopping excursion to Marshall Fields in Chicago.
I seriously hoped to persuade her to reconsider when I went to her bedroom that evening to help her get ready.
“Annabelle, it’s me.”
When she didn’t answer my knock, I tried the knob, but she’d locked her door. I curled my hand to a fist and pounded more loudly.
“Anna!”
“Evie, please, stop banging!” she said through the door. “I need to be alone awhile.” Her voice sounded so shaky that it worried me.
I put my eye to the keyhole and caught a glimpse of her kneeling on the floor in what appeared to be the black dress, and I wondered if she were ill.
“Please, let me in,” I protested, but she insisted, “Go on without me.”
Reluctantly, I left her, despite how wrong it felt. My mother buzzed about the foyer, digging into the coat closet, gathering wraps for her middle-aged cousins, and calling for Daddy to warm up the car.
“Where is Annabelle?” she asked me, a panicked look in her eyes when she realized my sister wasn’t with me.
“Still dressing,” I said, not wanting to admit that Anna had ordered me away. And even if I’d declared, “She’s locked in her room, acting very strangely,” it wouldn’t have explained anything. Annabelle didn’t exactly behave in a way most would consider normal, even on an ordinary day.
“That girl,” Mother murmured. “She’s always holding things up. You go on with your father.” She herded me toward the front door alongside the older ladies. “We’ll meet you at the club.”
So I sat smashed between the women in Daddy’s backseat, my head humming with their voices as they chatted all the way there; and it was no better once we arrived at the Blue Hills Social Club, where a pianist played loudly and two hundred guests all gabbed at once. I grabbed a glass of punch from the silver tray of a circulating waiter and pressed my spine into a corner of the foyer behind a statue of Athena, and I bided my time until I saw Annabelle walk into the room half an hour later.
She shed her coat, and I frowned at the sight of her in Grandmother Charlotte’s pearls and the dress from the Gypsy’s shop. I thought she was making her own bad luck, wearing black to such an occasion, but she positively glowed, as if lit from within. Her skin seemed even more alabaster, her blue eyes deeper. The dress fit her like a glove, hugging her hourglass figure, and a stab of envy pricked my heart.
“Breathtaking,” I heard a voice say from somewhere nearby, and I felt as though the word had been stolen from my lips.
Beneath the chandeliers of the Blue Hills Social Club, the silk shimmered, and heads turned as Anna entered the marbled foyer to greet her guests. When she made her way to my side, she linked my arm in hers, and I sensed a shiver run through her at the very moment a flashbulb went off. For a moment, all I saw were spots.
“I’ll miss you so much when I’m gone, Evie dear. Sometimes I think you’re the only one who even tries to understand me,” she whispered in my ear, and I caught a whiff of the lily of the valley she always wore.
“I’ll miss you, too, Annabelle.” I took her hands and squeezed; convincing myself everything was okay, despite the knot in my belly that said otherwise. “It’ll be so quiet with you out of the house and married to Davis, but at least you won’t be far.”
She looked at me curiously but said nothing, merely squeezed my hands hard. Then she moved on, kissing cheeks, chatting, and smiling for the photographer until a bell was rung and dinner was served.
I remember thinking the night should have been picture-perfect. All the ingredients were there—dozens of friends and family, many from out of town, Anna looking as resplendent as I’d ever seen her, and Davis as handsome as any movie star—only I had a sense of impending doom, confirmed when Anna stood up to toast her future husband.
There was something in her face that made me sit up straighter, the coconut-sprinkled cake I’d just eaten churning in my stomach, even before she turned to her fiancé and said quite plainly, “I apologize to everyone, and to you most, Davis, but I can’t marry you. I do like you well enough but I don’t love you near as much as my daddy does, and everyone in town knows Christine Moody has been crazy about you for ages. She’s the one you should be with, not me.”
A collective gasp filled the room, and I threw my hand over my mouth, afraid I might throw up everything I’d just eaten. What the devil was she doing?
Cool as a cucumber, Anna set down her champagne flute and smiled sadly. “I can’t pretend to be something I’m not. When I marry—if I marry—it will be for love and love alone.” She slowly turned to the table where our parents sat with Davis’ family. “I’m sorry, Mother”—she nodded—“Daddy.”
“Annabelle, you can’t do this!” Davis stood, knocking over his glass, and shouted after her, “If you walk out on me, don’t you ever come back!”
My father’s face had turned a scary shade of purple, and Mother swayed in her chair as though she might faint. I sat stunned in my seat so all I could do was watch as Anna strode purposefully from the room, the black dress setting off sparks beneath the light of the chandeliers. And then the dining hall exploded with voices buzzing like a mad hornet’s nest, before the drumming of my heart drowned out the rest.
I had come in the car with my father; but, in the confusion, he and Mother had left without me. So I begged a ride from Arden Fisher, whom I’d just met that morning. She was Mother’s great-aunt from Ladue in St. Louis.
When I arrived home, I knew from the closed door to my father’s study and the raised voices behind it that he and Anna were having it out. I didn’t stay, leaving the house without my coat to wander the grounds, shivering beneath the sliver of moon and rubbing my arms, feeling sick to my stomach, like the world had come to an end.
When the cold set my teeth to chattering, I finally went back to the house, afraid they’d still be shouting, but all was quiet. The cousins of Mother’s, who were staying in our guest rooms, told me in low tones that my parents had retired for the evening and Anna had fled “to heaven knows where, and I hope for her sake she stays away long enough for your father to calm down.”
I went to bed, afraid I wouldn’t fall asleep for the ache in my chest, but a fatigue swept through me as I drew the covers to my chin. Soon, a warm numbness enveloped me, chasing off any lingering chills.
Sometime much later, Anna came into my room, whispering my name and that she needed to explain why she’d done what she had; but I felt so conflicted by the hurt on my mother’s face and by my father’s anger at Anna’s “unforgivable betrayal” that I kept my eyes closed and pretended to sleep.
“I’m sorry, Evie”—she knelt beside my bed, and I felt the mattress dip as she leaned toward me—“but I had no choice. You can’t know what I’ve seen.”
I wanted to shout at her, to tell her how careless she was with people’s feelings; how irresponsible and selfish! Instead of lashing out, I kept silent. I proved to be a stoic Morgan through and through.
“Good-bye,” I heard her whisper before she tiptoed out again.
I wished I’d said something then. I wished I’d opened my eyes to look at her, even if I’d ended up yelling; even if I’d stayed mum and held her hand. But I’d done neither.
It was the last time I saw her until I’d married Jonathan and settled into a house all our own. Only that wasn’t the end of either the dress or of my sister.