Beautiful Little Fools(23)

“Oh, Jordie. I love them.” I really did. They were beautiful and certainly expensive but small, tasteful. They’d sparkle just the right amount in my hair and hold my veil in place perfectly.

Jordan smiled and lifted my veil from the hat stand. She placed it gently on my hair. Then she took the pins from the box and fastened it to my head. When she was finished, she trailed her fingers down from my hair to my cheek, resting them there for a moment. “Oh, Daise,” she finally said. “You’re a bride.”

I laughed a little, took a step back, and examined myself in the mirror. This woman staring back at me was indeed a bride, lacy, shimmery, pearlescent—I barely even recognized her. In my reflection, I suddenly caught sight of the third thing Jordan had brought to my room—a letter—sitting on my bed behind me now. “Is that a note from Tom?” I asked her, turning to go pick it up.

She shook her head. “No, I don’t think so. Fredda handed it to me on the way up, said it had come in the post for you.”

I examined the envelope, and there was no return address. But it bore a postmark, from Oxford. It had come for me, all the way across the Atlantic? I didn’t even know anyone in England. I ripped the envelope open, wondering if it still might be another gift from Tom, after all. But as soon as I caught a glimpse of the handwriting on the paper inside, I inhaled sharply.

“What is it, Daise?”

I pulled the letter out and ran my fingers over Jay’s neat script, the words swimming together as my eyes watered. Why today again, of all days?

Jay’s letters had still come for a little while after he went to war, but then I met Tom, and I’d stopped opening them. I’d burned them in my fireplace, unread, feeling it was somehow disloyal to read them. Or maybe, I worried deep down, they might break my heart. But suddenly, about a year ago, they’d stopped coming altogether. I’d hoped it meant he had given up on me, not that he had died.

And now my heart rose and fell, holding this piece of paper, with his handwriting on it. He was alive. He had not been killed in the war. He was alive. And in England?

“Daise?” Jordan’s voice shook me out of my reverie.

“Jay,” I finally said, his name sticking in my throat, making me sound hoarse. “I just… I haven’t heard from him in so long, Jordie. I didn’t even know if he was alive.”

Jordan gave me a careful, quick hug, not pulling me too close, to keep my dress perfect. “I’ll give you some privacy,” she said. “I’ll wait for you downstairs. Car should be leaving for the church in twenty minutes?” Her voice sounded like a question, and I nodded in response.

She blew me a kiss and walked out. As she shut my bedroom door behind her, I looked at the letter again, blinked, and then focused on the words.

My Dearest Daisy,

It has been a while since I’ve been able to write, but know that you have never been far from my thoughts. Every night in the trenches, I’d close my eyes, and you would be there. I love you. I have always loved you.

But I’ve just heard your news, all the way across the ocean.

In Oxford, everyone knows the Buchanan name. He has money, and I suppose he can give you everything. He has promised you everything. But he will never love you the way I love you. And you will never love him the way you love me. Remember, Daisy, that night in the rain? When our lips met that first time, I knew. I just knew. We’re meant for each other.

I still dream about the feel of your warm flesh against my hand, about the way I touched you and you made that little sound, like a bird, a desperate lovesick sparrow. Can you close your eyes and remember that moment, Daisy? He doesn’t make you feel the way I made you feel. I know he doesn’t.

And still, you might think, the money. Yes, the Buchanans have so much of it. But I will soon, too. I promise you. The war is over, and I’m studying at Oxford now. I’m going to figure out a way to make a fortune, so I can take care of you the way you deserve to be taken care of. I’ll buy you a big house, and all the diamonds you want, and we can live by the water and love each other forever. But I just need a little more time.

Please, Daisy. Don’t marry him. Give me another year or two. I promise you. Wait for me?

Love always,

Jay



I reached the end of his letter and held the paper against my chest, closing my eyes, the way he’d asked. I did remember. That night in my bed, his fingers had trailed slowly up my thigh. The sensation of pleasure at his touch had felt so intense, that a sound had inadvertently escaped from my lips that I’d never made before, or since. A lovesick sparrow.

But that was so long ago. When Daddy and Rose were alive. When I was a different girl, an entirely different Daisy.

Mrs. Buchanan had said something to me in Paris that I thought of again now. It was just after the seamstress had wrapped her tape measure all around me, clucking over the imperfections in my body, commenting in a French I supposed she thought I didn’t know: bosom too small, hips too narrow, legs too short. Corps de canard. Did I really have the body of a duck? I’d held my breath and thought how I would’ve been much happier shopping at Marlene’s shop in downtown Louisville, trying on the dresses she kept in stock.

“Daisy,” Mrs. Buchanan had said, as we’d walked out of the atelier, and my body had felt ugly, somehow foreign, displaced from myself. “You’re going to be a Buchanan soon. Go back in there and tell her to apologize to you. Demand she apologize. Or we will go to another atelier.”