Rhoda

by Ellen Gilchrist

  “‘You and Ingersol have a sister?’

  “‘She just moved back here. Her crazy little husband was working for us for a while. Then she ran him off. You might like her.’

  “‘You and Ingersol have a sister. I don’t think I can take it.’ Then we started laughing and I slowed the car down.

  “‘She lives over by the Colonial Country Club. Which will it be?’

  “‘If you have a sister I want to meet her.’ Raine sat back in the seat and I turned off the four-lane into your neighborhood and brought him to you.” Dudley was holding a glass of wine. We were sitting on a double bench on a bluff above the river. He looked at me out of his one good eye and his face got the soft, puffy look it wore when he desired me. When he used to come to the door of my room when he was fifteen and say things to me and offer to give me things and take me places. Get out of here, Dudley, I always answered. Later, when we were older, one night he offered me fifty thousand dollars to sleep with him and I still turned him down. The pleasure of denying him something that he wanted was worth an empire of gold. “Are you glad I did?” he ended.

  “It’s a good thing I was listening to Johnny Cash that week. I was in my Indian mood. I wanted to meet an Indian. Yeah, I’m glad you did. He was the love of my life. The only man I ever loved that I thought, really believed, was good enough for me.” I stared into Dudley’s good eye. I guess he is my brother. I know he is my brother. There but for the grace of God and one X chromosome and the fact that he was born first, go I.

  “I love you, Dudley,” I said. “I’m glad you are my brother.”

  So Raine got out of his Lincoln Continental and came into my kitchen apologizing for being late and not blaming it on Dudley although, since I always blamed everything on Dudley, I’m sure I did. Then I told the baby-sitter good-bye and gave her the phone number of the Jackson Country Club and we went out and got into the car. I think it had already started. Before I noticed how other men treated him. Before Dudley or one of them or maybe Raine himself told me he had been the best football player in the South. Since I knew nothing about football except the clothes I wore to games and the parties afterward and cared less. Since I never could remember what position he had played. Since only when I saw his name on the back of the program at an Ole Miss game, with his records still intact after seven years, or when men would talk about him and games he’d played and runs he’d made and touchdowns he had scored and passes he had caught, did I begin to envision him playing football. What I envisioned suited the image of the body that lay by mine, that will always be the yardstick against which I measure other men, and because of which I understand when I see love or read about it and say to myself, I had that, I was not stinted, my own true love, my one and only own true love.

  And I was his. But that was later. On this night, when I entered the ballroom of the Jackson Country Club on his arm I may have thought that the obeisance was for me. I was so stuck on myself, on my daddy’s money and my newfound freedom and my thin tan body in my new mauve dress, I may actually have thought that feeling of waters parting was about me. All evening I kept going away from him and flirting with other men and then going to find him again. He was so solid, it was like going to Hercules or Odysseus, so solid, so still. Going into his presence was not like anything I had ever known. Except, perhaps, my father, when I was young.

  I don’t think we stayed long at the party. We stayed for the Calcutta and there was a large blackboard and everyone was very drunk and bought the players for ridiculous sums. Dudley bought himself and Raine. Either Dudley did or a rich girl from the Delta did. After that Raine and I went out a side door and got into his car and went to a motel. It was pretty simple really. We got into his car and he took me in his arms and began to kiss me. Devour me. Gently, gently, tenderly, almost in tears. I will fall in love with you, he said. He had not had a thing to drink. He never drank. Since he was eighteen years old and got drunk one night and tried to kill a man he had never had a drink. I was drunk but I was also sober. The enormity of what was happening sobered me. I can remember every moment of that night. I can remember him rising above me on the bed and telling me he would never fuck me again when I was drunk. I can remember him taking me home. Late, very late. The baby-sitter had called my mother and her mother and the country club. I remember him saying that he loved me. I remember the way he smelled. The next day my skin smelt of him. My left and my right arm. I did not take a bath until late in the afternoon. Until after he called and said he had to see me.

  “We lost the tournament,” Dudley was saying. Sitting on the bench by the river looking at me with his one good eye. “I guess that was your fault, Shortie.”

  “You were pimping for him. You set me up.”

  “You said you weren’t sorry.”

  “I’m not,” I answered. “I just want to get the story straight.”

  I didn’t see him the next day. It was the second day, while the maid was at my house, he came and got me in the Lincoln and we drove somewhere, I don’t know where, perhaps along the new four-lane highway that my father had built. “I’ve never felt this way about a woman,” he said. “I don’t know what to do.” He stopped the car and kissed me. Then he drove to a park and we talked like generals planning a war. Staccato, fast, intense, the terrible intensity of desire. “I’m still married. I don’t have a divorce.”

  “So am I. My wife’s crazy.”

  “Where do you live?”

  “In an apartment.”

  “We can’t do it openly. He might take my children.”

  “She’ll take mine.”

  “Where will we go?”

  “Now?”

  “No, all the time.”

  “We’ll get an apartment.”

  “Okay, let’s go get one.”

  Perhaps we didn’t say all that that day. Perhaps all we did that day was go downtown to a hotel and make love until the sun went down. I called the maid and offered to pay her three times the amount she made. I bribed and begged her. I was two hours late. We gave her all the money that we had. We gave her too much money and she looked him up and down and shook her head. Even the maid understood. The children were there when we got home. He didn’t bribe them. He sat down in a chair and let them come to him.

  They didn’t care. They were lonesome for their father but they were too young to know that Raine was part of that. They liked him. He went out into the backyard and threw balls to them. We got a baby-sitter. We went out to dinner and went back to the hotel and made love some more. My mother called me about fifty times. The maid and the baby-sitter wrote the messages down. It was nineteen sixty-three. There weren’t any answering machines.

  While we were at the hotel my mother and father came and got the children and took them to the country. They paid the baby-sitter. They called Dudley and asked him what was going on.

  In the hotel room I lay upon his body and told him the story of my life. He told me how he had acquired the different scars. The worst scars were on his legs. He didn’t get them on the football field. He got them in an automobile accident when a drunk man was driving. He had not thought it could happen to him. After it was over he couldn’t play football anymore. He had to learn to sell insurance and municipal bonds. He learned how to play golf. He put his trophies away. He wasn’t a has-been. He was a great athlete who had had a bad break. It didn’t matter. In a year he was the golf champion of the state of Mississippi. People bowed their heads when he came into a room. He was the quietest, gentlest man I have ever known. He had the softest skin. He had the strangest, most unforgettable smell. He was half Italian and half Cherokee Indian. The love of my life. The one and only love.

  Even long ago, when it was nearer, I could never remember making love to him. We would enter a room and our bodies would meld. It was absolutely simple. It had a beginning and a middle and an end. I smelled like Jungle Gardenia or Estée Lauder or L’Heure Bleue. He smelled of shaving cream and the wild terrible smell of his body, of physical po
wer and cunning and coordination that was unlike anything I had ever known. Except for my father. My father was that strong, his shoulders were that powerful, that wide, that still. Maybe this man was my father to the tenth power. I lay upon his body and talked to him. Later, I would lie upon his body and cry and he would pat me like a child. He was never in a hurry. He never made a mistake or wasted a motion or dropped anything. He never stopped saying he loved me and I never stopped believing it. Wherever he is, until my death or his death, that time is always there, indelible upon my brain and his brain. My own true love. The man with the Indian blood and the dark skin and the gentle eyes. The uncircumcised man. Because of him I know what books and stories mean when men and women love each other without stint or question, in defiance of order, in defiance of self-interest or knowledge or pain. Sex was only part of it. Sex was where it took place, as on a stage. But sex was not what it was about. It was because I thought he was good enough for me. Because he believed I would one day be his equal.

  I can hear his voice. So deep and rich and slowed down to a Southern cadence. Full of humor and pathos. A black man’s voice, a foreign voice. It was not the voice of men who married the ladies of the Casual Club or escorted their daughters to the debutante balls. Although his family would come to that, because of him, because he was a hero and they were the sons and daughters of a hero and could get soft and still be safe.

  Then it was fall and we had found an apartment and I lived in it with a roommate and he only came there. He didn’t live there because his wife was pregnant. When I found out about it I went crazy. I beat upon his shoulders. I got drunk and yelled at him and woke the neighbors. I called him in the middle of the night and he would get into his car and come to where I was and say he loved me and cry. Lots of times he cried. He cried because he loved me. He suffered because of me. I loved to make him suffer. He brought his children to see me and I was nice to them. They sat in my apartment being very polite and drank the Cokes I gave them and told me about their schools. I thought they were ugly children. He must have known I thought that. After that evening I never had to see them again. Instead he came and got me and took me to the airport and we flew off to North Carolina in his plane. We rented a car. We drove around North Carolina and I waited outside offices while he sold municipal bonds to men.

  We took long trips together while he sold these bonds. He had several offices around Jackson. And several business partners. They were massive quiet men who had played football with him. Some were men who had thrown passes to him. Others were men who had made holes for him to run through. I didn’t know how to talk to them. They were too far away from what I knew. But Raine was not. He could be anything he wanted to be. He made people like him. He was likable and kind, quiet and dependable. Until me he had not been crazy.

  I wondered if he only liked my daddy’s money. But he knew it was not mine. Later, after I left him and began to find other men, he took one of the men out to lunch one day and told him the money was not mine, would not ever be mine because women didn’t get to have the money in my family.

  It was me he loved. Because he thought I would someday be his equal, was already his equal because of something in me that did not give up, never stopped looking, never stopped wanting, never gave in or compromised. Later, when I had my books and my name in the papers, he would call and tell me he was proud of me, would show up at my autograph parties and stand against a wall and look at me.

  II

  I had found something worth wanting, worth suffering for. With this blood in me that came from my daddy and liked to fight, I had found something worth fighting for. But who was I to fight, his brokenhearted wife and her children and her unborn baby?

  At Christmas of that year he had to go to Chicago to a reunion of his old football team. He had been Rookie of the Year. Had scored the most points of anyone in the backfield. Then he had the accident and it was over. But these men did not forget. Life did cruel things to men and men could bear it. Could go on loving each other in this strange fraternity of professional sports, where they did for a living what lesser men dreamed of doing, outran, outlasted, outwilled each other on a playing field. Anyone could have bad luck. They loved Raine for taking the bad luck away from them. They asked him about his knees.

  We had gone out to dinner with these men when they passed through Jackson, Mississippi, or when they lived in one of the towns we flew to in the airplane or drove to in the Lincoln. So now, to make me feel better about Christmas, we were going up there together to join their annual celebration.

  This was the first time I knew how much he lied to me. He had lied to me all along but I had not really understood it. I was vain and I had not been lied to before. The men who marry girls whose mothers go to the Casual Club don’t lie to people until they are middle-aged. They have a code. They marry you and tell you the truth until the time when they really fall in love. Then they lie to spare your feelings. They take upon themselves the burden of the lie to spare you pain.

  The world that belonged to this Indian-Italian man was not that world. In his world you took what you needed no matter what the cost. If the woman yelled at you and threw things across the room, you put your arms up before your face and took the blows. Then you begged and said you loved her, you cried if necessary, you bought her sofas and cars and rings with large stones your friends got for you on the black market.

  So I bought a beautiful new evening suit I saw in Vogue magazine and packed it in a suitcase and counted off the days until I flew with him to Chicago.

  Where were my children while this was going on? I had forgotten them. My brother Dudley told my father I was going to bring Raine in and marry him. Take care of the kids, he might have said. Let Rhoda capture him.

  Even my father was not immune to Raine’s glory, his picture in the Hall of Fame, his name on the back of programs, his gentle manner when he came into my parents’ home. Yes, my mother had seen him now. My mother knew I went to rooms and took off my clothes and lay down with this huge Indian-Italian man. She wore an expression that said this was the worst thing that had ever happened to her. Still, she paid thousands of dollars every year for fifty-yard-line seats in the stadium where he had been the hero. She read the programs too. She was not immune. Then too, he courted her. Looked up at her with his dark sweet eyes and told her that he loved me, that I was the love of his life, that he would never harm me in any way.

  I enrolled in a college in the town. A small, private college in the old part of town. I went to classes when Raine wasn’t around. It was the excuse for the apartment. It was what my mother told her friends at the Casual Club.

  I remember packing a suitcase to go to Chicago. I remember putting my beautiful black pantsuit with lapels of black satin and the little white satin blouse into the suitcase and closing the top. I remember the drive to Nashville where we caught the plane to Chicago. I remember the drive home on the eve of Christmas Eve and how we saw the dark shape on the horizon, just at dusk, halfway between Nashville and home. I thought it was a flying saucer. I told everyone I had seen a flying saucer and Raine always said he saw it too. But I would remember anything rather than remember what happened in Chicago.

  We went to the Palmer House Hotel where he had been staying on the night he had the accident that ended his career. He stayed there out of some perverse desire not to shield himself from unpleasant things. I had never stayed at a hotel that fine with a man who could pay for it with his own money. But I did not notice the hotel. All I knew was that on that night after we arrived I would put on my new suit and go to the banquet with Raine. As though I were his wife, in place of his wife, he would take me to the place that meant the most to him.

  We arrived late one evening. It was bitterly cold outside. I have never been that cold in my life. The wind came around the corners of the buildings and made you run back inside. We left the hotel and he shielded me with his body and we went to a bar where pictures of him were on the walls. His friends were there and we
sat at a small table and had dinner with two men who had been referees at the games. They told me stories of his glory. They walked around the bar with me. They showed me pictures of him. Young and sweet and dark, in his football uniform, holding the ball cradled in his arm. I held his hand beneath the table and thought how big it was, how perfectly designed for this football that had given him his power in the world.

  He brought me here to see these pictures, I decided. But I came to go with him to the banquet as his wife. First this banquet, then he will get a divorce. As soon as this unnecessary baby that she had only to keep him gets here. As soon as that is over I will take him away from his ugly children and his ugly wife and give him to my sons for their father. To my father for a son, to my brothers for a friend, this man I love, this man who is strong enough for me, who can dodge the things I throw at him, who can bear the pain I cause him because I am his one and only love, the one he cannot bear to be without.

  The next day there was a football game in the stadium where he had played. We sat on the sidelines on folding chairs. Other men and their wives were there. It was so cold they had to bring me a cape like the ones the players wore on the bench. They draped it over me. A boy brought paper bags and put them on my feet. I was a geisha at a football game, being cared for by men who could withstand the cold.

  A thin black man kept running down the side of the field and making touchdowns. Raine was like that, the other men said to me. Until the black man no one has done the thing he did for us. I held his arm. I watched his face as they said these things to me. I had never seen him happy. Until this day, sitting on those folding chairs in the cold I had never known him to be happy. With me he was in such sadness, such pain. He knew he could not keep me and it made him sad. My beauty vanished when we were together. There was no beauty in me now. Only this terrible Dexedrine thinness and this will to keep and overcome him.