I really want to talk when we get home. There was some other stuff about your husbands I saw online, and it kind of freaked me out. You always say we can’t have secrets from each other, but I think maybe you just meant I can’t have secrets from you.
Your Son, Camden
From the Desk of Ruby A. McTavish
March 20, 2013
Isn’t it enough that I wasted three years of my life with Hugh Woodward? Do I really have to waste another few hours on him now, in my twilight years?
Well, I won’t do it. Or rather, I’ll tell you the important bits, namely what I learned about myself through Hugh—or, more specifically, Hugh’s death.
I returned from Paris to North Carolina somewhere between a celebrity and a pariah. Honestly, I hardly remember anything of the rest of 1961 or the first half of 1962; I spent most of it in my room at Ashby in a haze of pills. Pills the doctors gave me, pills Loretta gave me from her own stash, pills that friends offered when they dropped by, ostensibly to talk to me, but mostly so they’d have a story for their next bridge night.
“I saw Ruby, and oh, she just looks dreadful, poor thing, I don’t know how she bears it.”
When something as cataclysmically horrible as your husband being shot to death on your honeymoon happens, people are both fascinated and repulsed by you. Fascinated because, my oh my, what a tale, what a juicy bit of gossip to spend in every dining room and nightclub you enter. Repulsed because … well, what if tragedy is catching? And such a thing would never happen to them, of course. No, they would’ve done this or that differently, because in the end, this is probably somehow all your fault anyway.
To be fair, it was my fault, but they didn’t know that.
So there I was, a widow at twenty-one, a daughter who became a wife, who was back to being a daughter again, ensconced in my childhood bedroom, no one quite sure what to do with me, least of all myself.
I’d envisioned a whole life for myself with Duke, you see. Before the honeymoon, obviously, before I knew just who I had married. But those months of planning the wedding had been some of the happiest of my life up until that point. It’s always exciting, living in hope.
Oh, darling, the hopes I had had. My own lovely house in Asheville or maybe Raleigh. New friends, new society, an identity separate from “Baby Ruby,” or Mason McTavish’s odd daughter. Yes, my family was rich, yes, we basically owned Tavistock, but I wanted something bigger for myself, something that felt uniquely my own.
And that dream, it seemed, had died with Duke.
I managed to go out in society again in August of 1962, when Nelle married that dreadful Alan Franklin, but other than that, I stayed at Ashby, turning down dinner invitations because I knew I was not a guest, but the main attraction.
Once I emerged from my haze, it was nearly 1963, and every time I went into Tavistock, or drove Daddy’s Plymouth over to Asheville to shop, I had the strangest feeling that I had somehow aged twenty years in two. Everyone seemed so much younger than me, so much freer.
I wondered if it was my penance, this malaise, for killing Duke.
That was what consumed most of my thoughts those days, Duke’s murder. I waited for nightmares to come, for a sudden rush of guilt to prompt me into some drastic action, like throwing myself off one of the bluffs—or, even worse, becoming a nun—but there was nothing of the sort.
Well, not nothing. Mostly, I felt empty, a bit numb, and if I’m honest, rather bored. But sometimes when I lay in bed at night, reliving that moment, I felt a strange sort of elation. I’d done that. This dreadful, horrible thing, a thing they hanged or electrocuted or poisoned or shot you for doing—I had done it and not gotten caught.
At the time, I thought no one even suspected me, but now I know there were whispers and rumors, which is probably why Daddy turned faintly gray when I mentioned that I might be interested in going back to college, and learning about the law.
That must have been why he decided to bring me so firmly into the family business.
I’m going to tell you a little secret, darling. One you’ll eventually find out for yourself, but let me go ahead and spill it now: once you’re as rich as we are, you are not really actively doing things that make money. You’re not, say, selling a product or providing a service. You had an ancestor who did those things once, and he made so much money that now that money makes money. I suppose this is why some countries eventually round up people like us and cut our heads off.
That said, we’d seen families like ours lose everything within a few generations. All it took was one reckless heir, one overindulged new bride, and suddenly you were selling art, selling furniture, off-loading surplus property, and—most offensively to Daddy—selling off parcels of the land you owned.