Sam Canaday had brought her home in the Toyota, leaving J.W. to wait for the ambulance and the police, driving away from the silent knot of workmen and the foreman, who was even then explaining his blamelessness to his chief. She had sobbed quietly and steadily all the way home, and he had not attempted to comfort her or stop her tears, except to keep one hand on her shoulder as he drove. He led her through the dim, still house and upstairs into the bathroom, where he sat her down on the edge of the old clawfooted tub and washed the white plaster from her hands and feet and face. Some of the scratches and cuts were deep, and the cut in her palm gaped with white lips, but she did not flinch at the hot water, or when he poured peroxide into her hands and bound it with brittle yellow gauze that he found in the medicine cabinet. She said nothing, only sobbed monotonously, and he did not speak, either. He walked her back into her bedroom and sat her down on the bed and brushed the plaster dust from her tangled hair as best he could, with the brush he found on her dresser. Then he said, “Hold up your arms, Mike,” and she did, obediently, and he pulled the filthy T-shirt over her head, and gently and slowly drew the blue jeans down over her hips. Mike wore no underwear. The tepid breath of the still-laboring air conditioner washed over her naked body, and she looked up at Sam Canaday, as if seeing him for the first time that afternoon. She stared at him for a long time, seeing the white dust in his light hair and eyebrows, and the streaks on his cheeks, where his own tears had coursed and dried. There were no tears now in the light green eyes. He stared back at her.
“You have a beautiful body,” he said softly. “Like a greyhound, or a willow tree. Get into bed now, and let me cover you. I’ll stay with you until Priss comes.”
As if motorized, Mike lifted her arms and put them around his neck. She pressed her body hard against his, feeling the triphammer of his heart and the tensing of the muscles of his arms and neck. She buried her face in the hollow where his neck and shoulder met, smelling the heat of the sun and the plaster dust and the drying sweat of him, and let her tears run hot against his skin. She pulled at him, tugged, pulling him down over her in the bed.
“Get in bed with me, Sam,” she sobbed. “Get in with me.”
He held her for a moment, very lightly, and then he removed her arms, one by one, and stood up.
“Not yet, Mike,” he whispered. “And not in this room, ever.”
He picked up the white night dress from the floor where she had dropped it three hours and an eternity before, and she let him slip it over her arms and head, weeping quietly as he did.
Priss came then, grim-faced and dry-eyed, and sat down on the side of the bed. She had a glass of water in her hand and two small red and gray capsules.
“Dalmane,” she said. “I want you to take them both. Knock you right out, and you won’t have a hangover when you wake up. Go on and do your crying, Mike; you need to cry, and you can cry between naps. But when you get up, you’re going to have to get on with it, I’ve just been over to tell DeeDee, and we had to call the doctor for her. She went completely to pieces; I thought she was going to shriek that godawful little shack down. Gaddis gave her a hypodermic that should put her out until tomorrow, and I want us to have some decisions made by then. You’ll have to make them. This’ll give you about five hours’ edge. I’ll be downstairs when you need me.”
Mike sat up and pushed her hair out of her eyes and looked at Priss, still crying.
“He crawled all the way down that goddamned horrible cedar alley and just lay down in the little room where his bed had been, Priss,” she hiccuped. “He just lay there and waited to die. And I didn’t stop him. I didn’t even hear him!”
“Shhh,” Priss Comfort said. “He did just what he wanted to do. Scamp always did. He went out of this world in the exact same place he came into it, and it was the place he loved best on this earth. I’m glad you didn’t stop him, Mike. After that last pain, there wasn’t anything but more of the same waiting for him. He knew that. Be glad he could choose his own death. Most of us can’t.”
“But how did he know! I need to understand how he knew!”
“Scamp would know,” said Priss.
Mike turned her face into the pillow and sobbed harder. She wondered dimly where all the tears were coming from. It seemed impossible for her thin body to hold so many tears. Presently, not knowing when she did, she drifted into sleep. Priss Comfort looked at Sam Canaday and nodded as if in satisfaction, and they left the bedroom, closing the door behind them.
Downstairs, Priss set up her command post in John Winship’s kitchen. She did not weep, then or ever. She dispatched J.W. Cromie, his yellow face streaked with silver grief tracks through the scrim of dust, to fetch Lavinia Lester and take her over to DeeDee Wingo’s house so that she would not sleep her despairing sleep alone. The mad old woman in the tiny back bedroom could not help her, and Duck Wingo had appeared in the Winship kitchen, obsequious and bursting-faced with important grief, and no hints could budge him home. Finally, glaring at him over her shoulder, Priss went into John Winship’s bedroom and stayed for a while and came out with the clothes she had selected for him to be buried in. Her old hawk’s face was serene as she went about the business of death, but her hands lingered over the clothes. Then she handed them briskly to Duck and waved him off to the funeral home.
“And then go on back home and stay with your wife,” she said. “There’s nothing for you to do here. Save that long face for the living.”
Duck went without an argument. He had always been in awe of Priss.
At ten that evening, Bayard Sewell came in, white-faced and stricken. “May I go see Mike for a minute?” he said deferentially to Priss, who nodded. He gave J.W.’s shoulder a little punch and went lightly up the stairs to Mike’s bedroom. J.W., eating a late supper of chicken and congealed salad from the Methodist Church Altar Guild with Priss, looked impassively after him. Priss did not lift her eyes from her plate.
Mike was drifting half-awake when Bay came into the room. She smiled groggily at him, but did not speak and did not sit up. He sat down on the side of the bed and took her hand. Presently he said, “I’d have been here sooner, but I just heard. Oh, Christ, if I’d only gone with you …”
“You couldn’t have done anything,” Mike whispered. Her voice was scratched and husky in her swollen throat.
“I could have looked harder at him when I came in this afternoon,” he said. “I thought he was sleeping, but he had his back to me, and I didn’t go around to make sure.” He rubbed his eyes hard with his thumb and middle finger. “I must have been a charming sight, bolting for safety like a skinned rabbit when J.W. knocked. I wish you had never seen that. I wish you could put it right out of your mind, somehow.”
She shook her head wearily; she had forgotten entirely that he had fled naked into the bathroom when he heard J.W. Cromie at the door. It did not matter; it seemed to have happened years ago, to two other people entirely.
“It doesn’t make any difference, Bay,” she said.
“What can I say to you that will help?”
“Nothing,” she said, feeling the tears pushing again at her nose and eyelids. “Just maybe leave me by myself for a little while longer. I thought I was cried out, but I guess I’m not. I don’t like to have people around me when I cry.”
“You never used to cry,” he said, smiling slightly. He touched the skin of her forehead very lightly, under the tangle of ashen hair. “Are you sure you don’t want me to stay? I have a great shoulder for crying.”
She considered, and found that she did not.
“I can’t do it right with you watching,” she said, trying to smile at him around the tears that were already spilling down her cheeks and into the corners of her mouth. “I’ll see you in the morning, okay? Will you be here in the morning?”
“You bet I will,” he said, rising from the bed. “In the morning and a lot of other mornings.”
And he left her in the darkness, weeping again, feeling acutely and hopelessly the void
in the world where John Winship was not.
Two hours later, just after midnight, Mike stopped crying and’ sat up and turned on the bedside lamp. She knew, somehow, that she was done for now with tears. She felt hollowed and lightheaded; her scratched and cut bare feet felt as though they skimmed inches above the carpet when she walked. She opened the closet door and reached in for something to put on. She saw the neat, spare ranks of her clothes there like hanged women: strange women whose crimes she did not know. They looked, in this musted childhood room, precious and overstylized and sybaritically fragile. The shoes in tidy rows on the floor looked too narrow, too fine-drawn, too expensive. The enormous Gucci tote sat on the closet shelf. Even ten years ago it had been expensive; today it would cost a fortune. The labels in the clothes read New York, Milan, London, Paris. Mike made an involuntary mouth of distaste. She did not remember the thin, crisp, smart New York woman who had bought those clothes, worn these shoes, carried that bag. She walked over to the bureau and studied the small silver-framed photo of Rachel that went with her wherever she went, taken three years before on an afternoon when they had been out sailing with Derek Blessing off Montauk. Rachel wore enormous black sunglasses and a terry sweatband around her dark, flying hair, and her braces dazzled in the sun. She looked, in the photograph, almost as old as Mike, and nothing at all like her. I lied to you, Daddy, Mike thought. She doesn’t look a thing in the world like you, or me, either. She wondered, suddenly and oddly, if Rachel would one day weep for Richard’s death as her mother had done for John Winship’s. I suppose she will, thought Mike, but I can’t imagine it.
Downstairs, the kitchen light was on, but there was no sign of Priss. Mike thought that perhaps she had gone home after all, and rummaged in the refrigerator for something to eat. She did not feel hungry, but she knew that the lightheadedness meant physical emptiness, and that she would need what strength she could muster during the next few days. She felt a great, dead fatigue at the thought of them.
“Mike? Is that you?” Priss came out of John Winship’s bedroom in a nightgown and old cotton flannel robe. She wore improbable pink satin mules on her feet. She held a paperback book in her hand.
“Were you asleep? I’m sorry I waked you,” Mike said. “I guess I’m hungry.”
“I hope you are. There’s already enough here for an army; I hate to think what that refrigerator’s going to look like tomorrow. Scamp knew a lot of people, and they all think they’re cooks. No, I wasn’t asleep. I was just sitting there thinking and reading some.”
“In Daddy’s room? It’s an awful room. There are much better bedrooms upstairs. Let me fix one for you …”
“No. I don’t want another room,” Priss said. “Somehow that hidey-hole feels like the only place I want to be.” She smiled. “Do you know what your dad was reading?”
“No. What?”
Priss held out the paperback. “Mary Roberts Rine-hart. The Circular Staircase. Can you imagine?”
“No,” Mike said, starting to laugh, and then feeling the laughter skewing over into the hated, monotonous tears once more. “Oh, Priss. Oh, shit.”
“I know,” Priss Comfort said.
Finally, after Mike had eaten a ham sandwich and they had both had coffee, they settled down on the porch under the wisteria arbor, and there they stayed the night. Mike slept, when she did, on the old glider. Whenever she opened her eyes, she saw Priss’s bulk in the old wicker rocking chair, rocking, rocking. Once or twice she saw the light-struck gleam of Priss’s green eyes. When the dawn crept in all gray and began to pinken in the east, and the first of the sleepy birds began to stir and call faintly in the still-dark trees, Mike sat up. She saw that Priss was watching her peacefully, still rocking.
“I haven’t done this since I was about eight,” Mike said, stretching. “I remember that I begged and teased and pleaded to be allowed to sleep out on the porch, and finally one night Daddy got tired of it and let me. But he made me promise that I’d stay out here all night, and not come running back in the house scared. He even locked the door so I couldn’t.”
“Was it as much fun as you thought it would be?” Priss said.
“No,” Mike said. “It wasn’t fun at all. He was right. I was scared to death.”
* #x002A; #x002A;
DeeDee and Duck did not appear until midafternoon. DeeDee came into the living room, where Priss and Mike had been receiving visitors all day, but which was for the moment, mercifully, empty, leaning on Duck’s arm and shuffling as though she were a very old woman. Even though she knew from Priss that DeeDee had taken their father’s death badly, Mike was profoundly shocked at her sister’s appearance. Her face was the white of old tallow, and she wore no lipstick or eye makeup or blusher, so that all of her flesh and skin that was not covered by her clothing was the same spoiled, ailing white. Her blue eyes were puffed almost shut, and her little tilted nose was red and raw at its roots, giving her more than ever the look of a dolorous piglet. Her black hair straggled out of its ponytail and over her massive shoulders, and when she stopped in the middle of the faded Bokhara rug, she swayed on her little fat feet like a squat tree in a gale. Duck attended her solemnly, a deferential consort to a great, grieving queen.
“We just went and saw Daddy,” she said, in a bruised little voice, to no one in particular. “He looks wonderful. So natural, like he had just dropped off asleep. I kissed him good-bye, and he didn’t feel a bit cold. They said you hadn’t been yet, Mikie, so I signed your name until you can get on down there. You ought to go on as soon as you change. There are just hundreds of people coming by to see him, and none of the family is there with him. It doesn’t look right.”
“I’m not going down there and sit beside my father’s coffin and grin at people who come to stare at him.” Mike was honestly outraged. “People who want to see if they can tell where the beam mashed him. It’s bad enough that we had to leave the coffin open …”
“Those people are my friends and my father’s friends,” DeeDee squealed. “Those people are old Lytton! And if you want them all talking about you because you won’t even go and sit beside your own father in his coffin, when he is lying there dead …”
“Dee,” Duck said warningly. He pressed her hand and patted her great, hamlike upper arm, and she jerked away from him. “Don’t pretend you care, Duck Wingo!” she shrilled. Tears ran from her eyes and mucus bubbled in her little nose. She was clearly on the very ragged edge, and Mike felt the old, grudging contrition. DeeDee, the favored one, the pretty, adored little womanchild of the dead father …
“I’ll go in a little while, Dee,” she said, and her sister nodded, wordless in her tears.
It was a long afternoon. People came in quiet, steady streams, talking in low voices, shaking hands solemnly with Duck, hovering over DeeDee, who wept afresh at each greeting and embrace. They all spoke to Mike, who sat opposite DeeDee on her mother’s little loveseat with Priss, and a few hugged her perfunctorily, but they were all brief and formal, and soon moved away again. To them all, Mike nodded politely, dry-eyed, and murmured her thanks. The hams and casseroles and plates of potato salad and fried chicken, the congealed salads and cakes and cookies, overflowed the refrigerator and mounted up on the kitchen tables and counters. Lavinia Lester kept the coffee freshly brewed, and passed plates and platters and napkins, and collected empties on trays and bore them back to the kitchen. The dishwasher stormed endlessly. Toward the end of the day, Bay Sewell, crisp and immaculate in a blue seersucker suit, slipped unobtrusively into the foyer and displaced Duck at the door, where he seemed to know everyone who entered and left, and shook all hands and kissed many cheeks as if he were the blood son of this house and not just its appointed heir. He kissed DeeDee, who clutched him and wailed, and hugged Mike briefly and formally, but his fingers pressed hard into her back, and his breath was warm in her ear as he whispered, “Later, darling. Hang on.”
The people who came were all kind, and Mike recalled a few of them, but no one seemed to w
ant to tell her they remembered her when she was knee-high to a duck, or remark that she looked just like her father. A handful complimented her on her writing and asked when she was going back to New York. Mike smiled and said, over and over, “Thank you for coming. It would have pleased Daddy a lot to have you here.” They all seemed glad to escape to the more vocal and accessible DeeDee. New York hung, dense and impenetrable, in the room between Mike and them.
More than once, Mike found herself looking around the room, and she realized finally that she was looking for Sam Canaday. But he did not appear. She knew that he would not, that he felt that this day was for family and old friends, but there was a void where his stocky figure should be. Under the dullness and fatigue, Mike felt uneasy.
They gathered in the kitchen in the dusk, after the last caller had left. DeeDee, restored and proprietary, tackled a plate of ham and potato salad, and Duck tucked into chicken pie. Bay Sewell drank coffee, watching them, his eyes holding Mike’s now and then. “Soon,” the blue eyes said. “Soon.”
She went upstairs to change into a dress that DeeDee would deem suitable for sitting up with the dead, and when she came back into the room they were discussing her father’s funeral. Priss had set it for the following afternoon, and had phoned the announcement in to the local and Atlanta papers and alerted the young jogging minister Mike had met with Sam and her father … was it only a month ago? But they had settled on no details up to now.
Brushing aside her unaccustomed linen skirts, Mike sank into a kitchen chair and listened, astounded, as DeeDee outlined a mountebank’s funeral, ticking off one rococo horror after another: open casket at the foot of the altar, banks of flowers, a full choir, honorary pallbearers by the dozen, the full pantheon of Methodist hymns, texts, and eulogies. A policeman on duty at both the funeral home and church to handle traffic, and a motorcycle escort to the old Lytton cemetery, where John Winship would rest, finally, beside his beloved Claudia and his parents. And then another graveside service. Duck grinned and nodded his approval as she talked. Priss and Bayard Sewell, like Mike, simply watched her. J.W. Cromie, coming in with another armful of floral arrangements, leaned against the kitchen, counter and listened too, his opaque eyes stonelike and unreadable.
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