“Mrs. Calvert?” I said.
No response.
I said her name again and touched her shoulder. Celine slouched in her chair and tucked her chin to her chest, letting out a snuffled snore. I stepped back, unsure what to do. I started taking plates to the kitchen and kept hoping each time I came back to the table that Celine would have roused. But when the table was clear of all the supper dishes and Celine still sat slumped in her chair, I left her to search for Truman.
I found him in the study. The room was filled with comfortable furniture and bookshelves, a stone fireplace, a cocktail bar, and a mahogany desk that had been Bernard Rosseau’s and was now Celine’s. Truman’s framed war medals and photographs from when he was a young man in the army hung on a paneled wall by a window. He was sitting in one of the chairs facing the cold hearth and smoking a cigarette. A glass of brandy sat on a table next to him.
“Mr. Calvert?” I said.
He slowly turned his head and looked at me with slight surprise. “Please just call me Truman, Rosie. What is it?”
“I’m afraid Mrs. Calvert is... well, I think she is...” My voice fell away.
“She’s what?”
“She has fallen asleep at the table. I can’t wake her up.”
Truman turned back around. He waited a moment and thenground out his cigarette in an ashtray. He picked up the tumbler of brandy, polished it off, and then stood.
I stepped aside as he walked past me, and we headed for the dining room. When we got there I was going to leave him to it and return to the kitchen.
“I might need your help,” he said.
Celine was in the same place where I had left her. After a couple of attempts to awaken his wife, Truman bent down and scooped her up.
“If you could just follow along and open the bedroom door and pull back the bedspread, please? That would be helpful,” he said.
Truman walked through the silent house with the slight hitch in his step and his sleeping wife in his arms, and I followed behind, seeing scarlet diamonds when Celine let out a snore. When we arrived at the master suite at the far end of the hallway, he stepped aside and I opened the door quietly and stepped in. I went to the four-poster bed across the room, plucked off the decorative pillows and set them on a window seat, and then pulled back the bedspread.
“So, um, will that be all?”
“Yes, thank you.”
I turned and quickly left the room.
I was washing up the dishes when Truman came into the kitchen a few minutes later with his empty brandy glass.
“She probably won’t remember what just happened now,” Truman said as he placed the tumbler next to the sink. “And it would be wise not to mention it. I don’t think it would go well for you if you did.” He leaned up against the countertop and folded his arms across his chest as if he planned to stay for a while and chat.
“Oh. All right,” I said hesitantly.
“No, I mean it. Don’t ever bring it up. Celine won’t like it thatyou saw her that way. She doesn’t like to look weak in front of people.”
I felt for the next dish in the suds. I wanted to be done. I wanted to forget about this night, too. Truman’s being that close to me was making me feel strangely uncomfortable.
“It’s one of the things her father bequeathed to her, unfortunately. The ability to worry too much about people seeing her as vulnerable.”
“Oh.”
“Fathers tend to do that, don’t they? Foist on us their own fears.”
I stared up at Truman and then quickly looked away. I wasn’t sure what it meant to foist something on someone, but I could tell from his tone it was something fathers shouldn’t do.
“I doubt, though, that your father was as hard on you as mine and Celine’s were on us,” Truman said. “Unless I’m wrong about that.”
I felt a ripple of both pride and unease zip through me. Daddy hadn’t been hard on me. But he didn’t like my colors. He hadn’t been able to trust that I could keep them secret. It was hard to pretend sometimes. I’d told him this. He’d actually seemed relieved when I asked to quit school, though he tried to hide it. “I... He was a good father,” I said.
“So he never had impossible expectations of you, eh?”
