Homeplace

by Anne Rivers Siddons

  “Let’s move you out on the sun porch where it’s lighter, Daddy,” she said. “You and Mikie can chat a little, and then it’s time for your nap. Sounds like you need it today.”

  He shrugged off her hand as if it were a biting insect and peered up at Mike again.

  “Just a minute,” he said. “Stay where you are, Micah. Want you to meet somebody. Daisy, go get us some iced coffee. There’s some still left in the pot from breakfast. Take Duck with you.”

  “Daddy, you’ll never get to sleep if you have iced coffee now, and you need your nap …” DeeDee started in.

  “Better make it buttermilk, Pop. Good for what ails you.” Duck Wingo beamed ferociously.

  “DeeDee, I want that coffee now, “ the wrecked man in the chair said in a soft, dangerous slide of voice, fully a register lower than the cracked chime that he had been using, and for a terrifying eyeblink Mike was a child standing in disgrace before a man whom her viscera remembered better than her mind. Then the impression was gone. DeeDee turned silently and made for the kitchen, vast and blue. Duck padded behind her, heavy-haunched in straining polyester plaid. John Winship made a motion with his autumnal hand and a man came out of the dark-shuttered living room behind him.

  “Sam, this is Micah Winship,” John Winship said over his shoulder. He did not say “my daughter.”

  “Micah Singer, I believe she is now. A famous lady writer, or so they tell me. Come all the way back here to clean up my slops. Micah, this is Sam Canaday. My lawyer. Excuse me, Sam, my attorney of record.”

  He grinned, a feral, death’s-head grin. The man at his side grinned back and then looked at Mike and put out his hand.

  “Evenin’, Miz Winship,” he said. “Or Singer. It’s a real pleasure to meet Lytton’s most famous native daughter. Though a pity it had to be under these circumstances. But a real honor just the same. I’ve read your work often, of course.”

  “Thank you,” Mike said. “I’m happy to know you, Mr. Canaday.”

  His hand was hard and dry and callused, and felt warm to her icy fingers.

  “Call me Sam,” he said affably. “Everybody does. One big happy family we’ve got here in Lytton, yessir.”

  “Sam,” Mike amended. She withdrew her hand.

  She disliked him on sight. He spoke like the kind of professional Southerner who drew arrows of scorn in her circle in New York. His white smile was vivid and flirted with insolence. He was massively built, almost square, deeply tanned, and dressed in faded blue jeans and dusty cowboy boots with turned-up toes. Thick, straight blond hair, lighter than his skin, looped down over one eyebrow, and he had what looked suspiciously like a wad of tobacco in his pale-stubbled jaw. His eyes were a startling amber green, and deeply circled. Wolf’s eyes, Mike thought. Cold, missing nothing. He wore round, wire-framed glasses. His voice was mild, deep and flat, and he had a slow drawl. He looked … she searched for it. Unblinking. Implacable. Planted, somehow, in earth.

  He went on grinning amiably at her, while John Winship looked from one to the other with the interest of a spectator at a tennis match. Neither Mike nor the lawyer said anything else, but something seemed to satisfy the old man, because he gave another eldritch cackle and jerked his hand again at Sam Canaday.

  “Wheel this thing out on the sun porch, Sam,” he said. “Tired of sitting in the dark like a goddamned bullfrog. Micah, go in the kitchen and tell Daisy and that idiot to forget the coffee. Sam’s gon’ get us a real drink. Bourbon’s on the tray by the secretary, Sam.”

  “I know where it is, Colonel,” said Sam Canaday. “I brought it to you. ’Scuse us a minute, Miz Singer.”

  “Call her Mike,” John Winship said. “I don’t know any Singer.”

  “By all means, do call me Mike,” she said sarcastically, but Sam Canaday was already wheeling her father out onto the bright sun porch off the foyer, and she said it to his broad back.

  “Mike, then,” floated back in his wake.

  Mike went into the kitchen as if by rote. Nothing seemed to have changed in the big, square white room. Duck Wingo was wrenching at the ice trays in the yellowed old refrigerator, and DeeDee was putting tall glasses on a tray. Mike remembered the tray, an old, lacquered Chinese one of her mother’s, with white rings on it where wet glasses had been carelessly set. The glasses in DeeDee’s hands, scattered with white and yellow daisies, she did not know.

  “He says to forget the coffee,” she said. “He’s going to have bourbon instead. I guess those glasses will do; why don’t you just bring them?”

  “Bourbon! He is not!” DeeDee snorted indignantly. “He knows darned well he’s not supposed to touch alcohol. Dr. Gaddis was explicit about that. It could kill him. It’s that shyster lawyer of his, that Sam whatsisname …”

  “Canaday,” Mike said.

  “Canaday. He knows as well as we do Daddy can’t drink, but he keeps right on bringing it in the house, and when you call him on it, he just smiles that … I-don’t-know-what-kind-of smile …”

  “Shiteatin’,” Duck put in.

  “… and says he hasn’t noticed that Daddy’s senile yet, and seems to him he’s capable of making up his own mind what kills him. I know he gives Daddy all he wants when he’s here by himself with him.”

  “Is he, very often?” Mike asked.

  “Oh, yes, every afternoon after work, practically, and sometimes he stays for supper … cooks it himself, if he doesn’t like what I’ve left. Lord knows it’s a wonder he hasn’t poisoned Daddy … and then either stays on and plays cards or chess with him, or comes back around ten for another drink. I think he’d move in here if he could. And the way Daddy dotes on him, that’ll probably be next. He’s wormed his way into Daddy’s confidence, and he’s not going to let go of him until he gets all he can out of him. He’s encouraging Daddy to make a spectacle of himself over that old house, telling him he can fight the DOT, telling him he thinks they can win. He’s nothing but a social-climbing opportunist!”

  DeeDee’s great shelf of bosom was heaving like a barge on a storm-tossed sea, and there were circles of dull red under the vermilion rouge on her cheeks. Her chest and neck flushed in the same way that Mike’s own did when she was angry or embarrassed. Mike had wondered, when she was a child, if their mother’s fair skin had done the same thing.

  “What on earth has he got to gain socially in Lytton by latching onto Daddy?” she asked. The name slid out naturally here in this resonating kitchen, but its aftertaste was alien. She licked her lips as if to dislodge it.

  “Daddy’s somebody in this town,” her sister spat. “The Winships always have been somebody in Lytton; you know that. Or you would if you’d bothered to stay here and find out. He’s got plenty to gain. He’s probably after Daddy’s money, too. And on top of it all, he’s ignorant, and arrogant, and downright common!”

  Mike thought of the man she had just met. DeeDee was wrong. Arrogant Sam Canaday certainly was. Common, probably. Ignorant, no.

  “Daisy!” John Winship’s voice called from the sun porch, surprisingly robust.

  “Coming, Daddy,” her sister trilled back. To Mike, she said, “Come on and see if you can talk some sense into him about the bourbon. If not, you’re at least somebody fresh for him to yell at.”

  Fatigue suddenly flooded Mike like dirty water. Sensation and nuance weighted and numbed her. Her entire body sagged with it. The kitchen spun slowly out of focus and then swam back in.

  “Please make my excuses, Dee,” she said. “I just can’t hold myself up much longer. I’ve got to lie down for a little while. I think I’ll go on up; where do you want me to put my things?”

  “I’ve made up your old room,” DeeDee said. “But you might at least make an effort, Mike. We’re all tired, you know. And I’m paying Estelle extra to stay with Mama Wingo; we can’t stay here all afternoon and night waiting for you to take a nap.”

  “Never mind, Miss Daisy,” said Sam Canaday, coming into the kitchen in amazing silence, considering the taps on the co
wboy boots. “You and Duck go right on home. Let Miz Singer go on up and get some rest; she looks worn out. It’s a long way back home in more than miles, I guess. I’ll sit with the Colonel, and I’ll be glad to fix us all some supper later, if she doesn’t feel like it.”

  He smiled at Mike, his white teeth vulpine in the ocher face. She could not read in his strange green eyes whether or not he had heard what DeeDee had said about him. Somehow she did not think he would care if he had.

  “Thank you,” she said. “I’m no good to anybody right now.”

  “I couldn’t dream of letting you do that, Mr. Canaday,” DeeDee said, puckered with disapproval.

  “No trouble at all,” he said. “You know I get supper for the Colonel and me about half the time.”

  “Come on, DeeDee,” Duck Wingo said. “I got to see Curtis Pike about the Turnipseed place before supper. Let Mr. Canaday take over the housekeeping and so on, since he’s so good at it.”

  It was obvious that he meant the words to be insulting, but Sam Canaday just broadened the white grin to include Duck and settled himself comfortably against the scarred counter. He looked completely at home in the kitchen.

  Mike did not wait to see the tiny drama out. Suddenly they all wearied her nearly mortally.

  “I’ll see you all later,” she said, walking out of the kitchen and up the hall stairs into the dark, still interior of the Winship house. She felt as if her legs were a hundred feet long and made of wire. The only thought in her mind was getting to her bed before her knees buckled. She found the door to her old room, moved blindly across the stale-smelling carpeting, and turned on the window air conditioning unit to high. She dropped her satchel and stepped out of her shoes and was asleep before her face hit the piled pillows on the high, narrow white bed with the pineapple finials that had always, in her lifetime, stood in this room. She did not move in her sleep, and she did not dream.

  Sometime later—how much later she could not tell, for the blinds were shut tight and the room’s chill darkness might have been that of early night or early morning—she woke. She knew instantly where she was, and the fear that had stirred sluggishly all during that long day under the mantle of the drug made as if to uncoil swiftly and engulf her before she could clench herself against it. She was out of bed and reaching in her purse for the Xanax, scrambling frantically among the flotsam of tissues and cosmetics and ball-point pens, when she heard sounds from the kitchen directly below her. She paused and listened, remembering that she had listened like this many times before, when she had wakened from a nightmare-troubled sleep, and heard the comforting sound of Rusky’s big bulk moving slowly about the kitchen. She heard, now, the same slow movement of bulk, the same practiced handling of pots and chink of dishes, the same soft rumblings of conversation and laughter. Only this time it was not Rusky talking to J.W., but Sam Canaday saying something to her father. She recognized the laconic voice.

  “Oh Rusky,” Mike said aloud, and felt such a great stab of pure, howling aloneness that she felt flattened, pulverized, obliterated. And then, like a benediction, a blessing, came the slow, unmistakable, and inexorable draining away of the fear. In its place there was a great, level languor, an endless, simple, and final white peace. Stumbling with the weariness of a child, Mike went into the bulbous white bathroom and dropped the Xanax pills, one by one, into the toilet, and flushed it. Then she went back to the bed and crawled underneath the covers and pulled them over her head and slid deeply and finally toward oblivion.

  The last thing she heard was Sam Canaday’s faraway voice saying, “That can wait until the morning. Let her sleep.”

  Mike did.

  14

  THE NEW LANGUOR WAS THERE WHEN SHE WOKE THE NEXT morning. She lay still, unable to tell what time it was from the slant of the light through the old-fashioned wooden Venetian blinds, only that the sun was shining. When she lifted her arm to look at her watch, she felt as if she had slept a long time in one position, or was recovering from influenza. Her arm was infinitely heavy, and there was a deep, sweet ache in it. The same ache pervaded her entire body. She stretched her legs as far as they would go, and then her arms, and flexed her fingers and toes, and still the not-unpleasant ache persisted. She blinked her eyes hard several times, until the watch’s deceptively simple face swam into focus. It was a square Cartier quartz tank watch that Derek Blessing had given her the first Christmas they were together, and it had, for the first time in her memory, stopped.

  It did not bother Mike at all that she did not know what time it was. The white languor around her held her as completely and airlessly as a bell jar, a hermetic dome. She knew precisely where she was and why she was there; she knew that when she got out of bed and went downstairs it would be to confront, not only her father, but the entire first half of her life, a life that she had put neatly away years before and not thought to take out again. She knew that waiting there for her at the bottom of the scarred oak stairs, seared into the very walls, soaked into the carpet, was the most she had ever known of pain. She did not care. She knew, too, knew to the tips of her nerveless fingers and toes and without knowing how she knew, that the great, drowning surge of fear and agony and the avalanche of memory that she had dreaded would not materialize. The bell jar, she sensed, was impenetrable; would hold.

  She lay for a time listening to the deep-sea hum of the air conditioner and her own tranquil blood, pouring sweetly through her veins. The window unit shut out all other sound in the big, dark room. She would have known where she was if she had waked out of a ten-year coma, though. The smell of years-old lemon polish and dust from the worn blue carpet that had been laid down in her thirteenth year was as familiar in her nostrils as the acrid demon’s breath of New York. The feel of the thin-worn, silky old percale pillowcases against her cheek was the same as she remembered, though they smelt powerfully of mothballs, as they had not then. She could almost trace in her mind the design of scallop shells along their hems, so powerful was the effect of rote memory. All her senses seemed sharper with it, heightened to near-painful awareness, a pleasant contrast to her languorous, weighted limbs. The effect was one of luxurious physical indolence. Mike could feel every inch of her skin.

  Presently she crawled out from under the covers and padded over to the windows, raking her fingers through her hair. She switched off the air conditioner and pulled up the blinds. Sunlight so white that it blinded her flooded the room, dust motes dancing crazily in its strata. Eyes squeezed shut, she jerked at the paint-sealed old window frame until finally, with a despairing squeal and a shower of ivory paint flakes, it flew up. Heat and the great, fragrant ocean of wisteria scent and the buzz of early cicadas swam into the room. Mike opened her eyes and took a great, deep draft of home.

  She took a bath in the bulbous old bathtub, the porcelain worn to grittiness on her buttocks. There had never been a shower in the Winship house, and so she squirmed around in the tub and lay on her back, knees in the air, and washed her hair under the scanty stream from the faucet with the new bar of Ivory soap in the wire soap dish. She remembered that when she had lived here, she had used a snakelike tube that attached to the faucet and ended in a sprinkler that was given to escaping and whipping around the bathroom, spraying everything. She could still hear Rusky grumbling about it. Sometimes she had washed her hair downstairs at the kitchen sink, where there was a rudimentary dish sprayer and Rusky to guide it and rinse her fine, silken hair twice in water, once in vinegar for shine, and once again in water. The vinegar, Rusky said, brought out the highlights in Mike’s hair and made it shine white-gold in the sun. For DeeDee, she used strong tea, to enhance the satiny darkness. Mike had stopped washing her hair in the kitchen when Duck Wingo had once come to pick up DeeDee unexpectedly early and caught Mike at the sink with dripping hair and her hated cotton undershirt clinging, sopping, to her barrel-stave ribs and pussy-willow breasts, and called her a banty pullet. His eyes had been on her breasts, though. She had stopped using vinegar as a rinse the first
time Bayard Sewell had put his face to her thistledown hair and said that she smelled like chowchow, and had gone up to the drugstore and bought a great pink bottle of Tame.

  She got out of the bathtub and scrubbed her body with the thin, grainy old towel, and wrapped her hair in another, and stepped into bikini pants and bra from her suitcase. She rummaged for slacks, and then, on impulse, went to the great old mahogany bureau against the far wall of the bedroom and opened the drawers. The various mothballed years of her life lay there, neatly folded by some hand other than hers. Who could have put them there? Rusky was years dead when she had left this house, DeeDee married and gone, John Winship unthinkable. In the bottom drawer she found and put on a faded-to-milk-white pair of blue jeans she must have had when she was a preteen, because they still bore the name tag that Rusky had sewn into her clothes when she went away to Camp Greystone, and that had been when she was eleven. The blue jeans fit; were, in fact, a little loose in the waist. She grimaced at her thinness. In another drawer she found T-shirts and put on one that had the face of Mickey Mouse on it. Like the blue jeans, it was clean and faded and smelled of mothballs and fit loosely. Mike remembered her joy at joining the Mickey Mouse Club, the new and warming sense of belonging that flooded her when she became a Mouseketeer. In the bureau’s wavery, bluish mirror, her face looked back at her as if up through water, and her eyes, large and light and slightly puffed from sleep, could have been the eyes that first gleamed silver with joy at being one of Mickey’s children. She anchored the towel into a damp turban with an old leopard-printed scarf and padded, barefoot, down the stairs and through the foyer into the kitchen.

  Her father was there, sitting, not in the wheelchair, but in one of the blue and white chrome chairs that matched a hideous dinette set she had not seen before. A small Sony TV set on the counter next to a new microwave oven brayed out a game show; captive in it, a fat girl and a chinless young man jumped up and down in slack-mouthed excitement. Her father was staring expressionlessly at the set while a cup of coffee cooled in front of him. A barely touched plate of toast and scrambled eggs sat on the table in front of him, and a jar of strawberry preserves with a spoon in it. While she watched, he reached over and dug a heaping spoonful of the viscous red substance out of the jar and put it into his mouth, not taking his eyes off the Sony. Some of the preserves missed his mouth on the side that curved downward into his neck, and clung there on his chin, glistening. He did not seem to notice. A soapy clink sounded from across the room then, and Mike looked in the direction of the sound. Sam Canaday stood at the sink, his back just as broad in an improbable cotton-knit burgundy this morning, his arms disappearing up to the elbows in dishwater. The round clock over the stove said quarter past eleven.