William Lashner - Bitter Truth

“That marriage was a mistake. I didn’t know what love was until I met your granddaughter.”

“Yes, great wealth has that effect on people. Your private investigator did tell you the value of our family’s holdings, didn’t he?”

“I love Jacqueline,” he said, rising from the bench with evident indignation. “And if you’re implying that my intentions are…”

“Sit down, Mr. Grimes,” she said, staring up at him with that opaque blue eye. “We need no histrionics between us. We were very impressed with the hiring of your investigator. It shows an initiative all too rare in this family. Sit down and don’t presume to understand our intentions here.”

He stared at her for a moment, but half her face smiled at him as she patted the bench once again, and so he sat. The gardener grunted and kneeled behind them, searching on his hands and knees for the tiniest weeds poking through the rich black mulch.

“Those purple spikes over there are from our favorite plant in this garden. Dictamnus albus . The gas plant. On windless summer evenings, if you put a match to its blossoms, the vapor of the flowers will burn ever so faintly, as if the spirits buried in this earth are igniting through its fragrant blooms. Jacqueline has always been a morose little girl, she had the melancholia from the start. Whether you marry her for her sadness or her money is no concern of ours.”

He began to object but she raised her hand and silenced him.

“We are simply grateful she has found someone to care for her no matter what tragedies will inevitably befall her. But we want you to understand what it means to be a member of our family before it is too late for you.”

“I can imagine,” he said.

“No, I don’t think so. It is beyond your imagining.”

The gardener grunted as he stood once more and began again with the shears.

“Our blood is bad, Mr. Grimes, weak, it has been defiled. Where there was strength in my father there is only decay now. My sister died of bad blood, my son has been ruined by it. The result is the weakness evident in my grandchildren. If you marry Jacqueline you must never have children. To do so would be to court disaster. You must join us in refusing to allow the weaknesses in our family’s gene pool to survive. Let it die, let it fade away. We are different from those pathetic others who try so futilely to keep alive a malignant genetic line at all costs. All that’s left of our physical bodies is rot. Everything of value has already been transferred to the wealth.”

The old lady sighed and turned her head away.

“Our wealth has been hard earned, Mr. Grimes, earned with blood and bone, more pain than you could ever know. But whatever remains of my father and his progeny, and of my husband too, still lives in the corpus of our family’s holdings, their hearts still beat, their souls still flourish through the tentacles of our wealth. Everything we have done in what was left to us of our lives was to honor their sacrifice and to maintain the body of their existence towards three divine purposes. Conciliation, expiation, redemption.”

Each of the last three words was spoken with the strength and clarity of a great iron bell. Grimes was too frightened to respond. The chiming of the gardener’s shears grew louder, the pace of his cuts increased.

“Our three divine purposes have almost completely been achieved and we will never allow an outsider to undo what it has taken generations of our family to accomplish. You won’t be squandering our money, Mr. Grimes. You won’t gamble it away like Edward or invest it foolishly like Robert. Your sole duty will be to preserve the family fortune, to tend it and make it grow, to treat it with all the care required by the frailest orchid to satisfy its purpose. And we want to be absolutely clear on one thing. You will never leave poor Jacqueline and take a piece of her money with you. That will not be allowed. Our wealth was hard won by blood and has been defended by blood. Don’t doubt it for a moment. Our father was a great and powerful man and he taught us well.”

The silvery clips of the gardener’s shears came closer and closer until the hairs on the tips of Grimes’s ears pricked up. With each scissoring of the clippers a cold slid down the back of his neck. The old lady looked at him with her one good eye almost as if she were casting a spell.

“Well, enough family business,” she said, and instantly the gardener’s shears fell silent. “Tell us about your ideas for the wedding, Mr. Grimes. We are all so excited, so certain that you will make our Jacqueline terribly happy.”

As he stammered a few words about their plans, how they wanted to be married as soon as possible, the old lady started to rise and the gardener was quickly at her side, helping her to stand. She left her cane resting on the bench and with her free hand grabbed tightly onto Grimes’s arm. Her grip was cold and fierce as she walked with him and the gardener back to the house.

“There is no need to blindly dash into something as deadly serious as marriage, is there?” she asked as they walked. “Take your time, Mr. Grimes, wait, be certain. That is our advice,” she said and then she chatted almost gaily about the flowers, and the grass, and of how the high level of humidity in the air exacerbated her asthma.

Shortly after that visit, Grandmother Shaw died in her ninety-ninth year. She had given explicit instructions that she was to be cremated and her ashes intermingled with the ashes of her husband and placed again beneath the feet of the statue of Aphrodite. The funeral was a bleak and sparsely attended affair. It was shortly after the funeral that Jacqueline first started fearing for her life.

She claimed there were men following her, she claimed to see dark visions in her meditations. When they walked along the city streets she was forever turning around, searching for something. Grimes never spotted anything behind them but he humored her fears. When he asked her what it was that frightened her so, she admitted that she feared one of her brothers was trying to kill her. She said that murder ran in her family, something about her grandfather and her father. She wouldn’t have been surprised if her grandmother died not from an asthma attack but was smothered with a pillow by one of her brothers. The only family members she ever talked about with kindness were her sister and her dear sweet Grammy. Grimes never told her of his brutal conversation with Grandmother Shaw. They would have married immediately but for a delay in Grimes’s divorce proceedings. He offered his wife everything, he didn’t care, because everything he had was nothing compared to all he would have, but still the case dragged on. And still Jacqueline’s fears increased.

Then, one winter evening, he returned to the apartment from his dental office. She had been at the Haven all morning, meditating, but was supposed to be home when he arrived. He called out to her and heard nothing. He looked in the bedroom, the bathroom, he called her name again. He was looking so intently he almost passed right by her as she hung from the gaudy crystal chandelier in her orange robe, a heavy tasseled rope twisted round her neck. The windows were darkened by thick velvet drapes and the only light in the room came from the chandelier, dappling her with the spectrum of colors sheared free by the crystal. Beneath her thick legs a Chippendale chair lay upon its side. Her feet were bare, her eyes open and seemingly filled with relief. Looking at her hanging there Grimes would almost have imagined her happy, at peace, except for the gray tongue that rested thick and swollen over the pale skin of her chin like a stain. He took one look and knew just how much was gone. He turned right around and took the elevator down and used the doorman’s phone to call the police.