The Wedding Veil(31)

Mrs. Hartwell, understanding, led Edith into an open room of beds. She and Cornelia often spent days here talking and cross-stitching with patients, reading to them, offering a friendly smile. Edith spotted Kathleen Lipe right away. She was lying still on her back, serene, her short hair matted to her head. Even with her eyes closed, Edith could see the dark circles underneath them. What an ordeal she must have been through. What an ordeal she would continue to relive for the rest of her life. At eighteen, she was no longer a child, but Edith suspected that the daughter of Biltmore’s head carpenter and skilled-labor overseer would grow up today if she hadn’t already.

As Edith sat down on the stool beside her bed, she couldn’t bear to wake her. But Kathleen opened her large, round eyes to the light and blinked, perhaps in disbelief, to see who was sitting beside her.

“Mrs. Vanderbilt,” she whispered.

“Shhh,” Edith said. “Don’t feel like you need to talk, sweet Kathleen. I know this has been an unfathomable ordeal for you.”

“Papa,” she managed to eke out. “Have they found Papa?”

Edith’s stomach turned. She had declared that no expense would be spared to find Captain Lipe, one of George’s first hires on the property. She had wished and hoped that he would be found alive, clinging to a tree or a roof. But no. The fate of Captain Lipe was, unfortunately, what they all had feared.

“He was so brave, Mrs. Vanderbilt,” Kathleen said weakly. “Papa held me to that tree for hours. We kept climbing higher and higher as the water rose.”

Edith’s eyes were filled with tears, her stomach sick and knotted at the thought of those poor souls, those people clinging to the very tree she touched earlier.

“Lifeguards kept trying to rescue us, but they couldn’t reach us. After a while, his arms finally just… slipped away. The last thing I remember him saying is ‘Shucks! Shucks!’ Have you seen him, Mrs. Vanderbilt? Is he okay?”

The hope in her eyes broke Edith’s heart as she took Kathleen’s hand, which was wrapped in bandages. “Darling,” she said gently, “I’m afraid your brave and valiant father didn’t make it.” Captain Lipe’s body had been found less than half a mile from the gate of Biltmore Estate, a proud hero of a man reduced to a bloated, contorted shell. Edith hated being the one to share this news, but she had felt, somehow, that it should be her. The Lipe family was one of their own. They had celebrated Christmases and May Days together, sewn garments for the less fortunate, spent many a cold winter night talking around the fire. Mrs. Lipe had fled to higher ground with their disabled daughter and her aging mother when the rains came, and Edith felt she had enough on her plate without having to wade through floodwaters to deliver the terrible news to her child. Kathleen had lost a father, but by the sheer grace of God, she still had a family to go home to.

Kathleen started to weep. “If only we had evacuated with Mama!” She looked up at Edith earnestly. “But then who would have stayed behind to tie the chickens to the porch?”

Edith knew that that porch—and that house—no longer existed. But Kathleen had faced enough loss this week. The news about her destroyed home could wait.

“I lost my parents when I was a young girl,” she said, wondering if the child could even hear through her sobs. “And that sort of loss is terrible. But I am a parent, and I can tell you for certain that if your daddy had the choice of saving his life or yours—if he had to lose his life instead of face the world without you—he would make that sacrifice again and again.”

Kathleen wiped her eyes. “But what is to become of us now?” she asked. “What shall we do without Papa here to keep us safe?”

Edith stroked the girl’s bedraggled hair, wanting to soothe her, knowing that her arms and legs, torn and bruised from hours spent clinging to tree bark, were the least of her wounds now.

“We are Asheville women,” Edith said to Kathleen, putting on a brave face. “We are strong; we are resilient. We are smart and savvy. We will rebuild our town. We will get through this. Together.”

“We will get through this together,” Kathleen repeated.

Hearing the girl repeat her words of solidarity almost made Edith believe them.



* * *



That night, after Cornelia had gone to sleep, Edith returned to the library, as she so often did now, to talk to George. Even when they had been gone for months, Edith could come here to find him again. Edith and Cornelia, when they were at Biltmore, lived in the renovated bachelors’ quarters to save money on heating and other bills, so uncovering her chair and table in the oft-closed library had become a part of her ritual. She would talk to George about Cornelia and Biltmore, about the trees and the estate, about the dairy and the future. And as long as she was sitting in the library, he talked back.

She had never told anyone this, of course, for fear she would be placed in a sanitarium and Cornelia would be, as she had once feared, all alone. But by the time the flood happened, this practice of speaking to George in the library was as commonplace to her as breathing. She had forgotten it was something to be ashamed of.

As Edith flopped down in the red chair near the fire and lit a cigarette, she could hear George’s scolding. This was how it always began. Her smoking; him scolding her.

“After today, even you might need a cigarette, George,” she said. “It feels insurmountable. I think we have to let the village go.”