“I want her in a heavy car. Those roads up there are treacherous. You ought to see those roads. It’s like the dark ages. That state’s so poor they barely put up road signs.”
“What are you going to drive?” Niall reached across the table and touched his brother’s arm. Darling lost Daniel, who had lost so much in so many ways. Lost and given away and wasted. Spoiled-rotten Daniel, who had drowned his abilities in Chivas Regal since he was eighteen years old. Chivas or home brew or anything he could get his hands on. Drunk continuously for twenty-five years. At first, to blot out the expectations of his parents and his older siblings. Later, because it was a habit. Lost everything in the process: his women, his inheritance, his business. Now he was about to lose his daughters, his “Jewels in my Crown,” as he called them. Losing them because they never knew who they were dealing with. Sober, generous Daniel, or hungover, needful Daniel, or drunk, demanding Daniel. Losing them anyway because he had to lose them. Because they had to lose him to find themselves. Because that’s the way it is in the world. Losing them in spite of the fact that they loved him more than they would ever love another man. Because he was their daddy. Their beautiful, golden, charming daddy.
And who wouldn’t love him, Niall considered. This tall blue-eyed balding angel, this honey-sweet human, this good-looking father. Olivia and Jessie are doomed to look for his surrogates in the world, to try to re-create him everywhere, to fashion him from whatever they can find: a look, a glance, a way of walking, a deep voice, a wide chest, a way with animals. Doomed to search for and try to own his shadows. This is how we are, Niall knew. This is what we do. Unlucky Jessie, who has found a boy who looks like Daniel and also has his weaknesses. She is stuck for a long time, perhaps forever. Luckier Olivia, who only loved a dream for her first fifteen years. Since the dream was of her own making, perhaps she can go on dreaming, may even be able to love a man of her own choosing one day. It will be interesting, Niall decided, to see if she can ever love at all. I’m pulling for her, that’s for sure.
As if on cue, Olivia came into the dining room with her cousins Winifred and Lynley. Daniel called out to the kitchen and the disgruntled elderly maid, Jade, began to bring in platters and set them on the table, muttering about food getting cold and old people about to die who were called on at the last minute to prepare elaborate meals with no help in the kitchen and not much appreciation. Daniel got up and went into the kitchen and began to help. Olivia and Winifred got up, too, and soon the four of them had managed to bring fried chicken and boiled new potatoes and steaming bowls of spinach and cooked carrots and baked squash and homemade rolls out onto the table and apply spoons to the bowls. “Sit down,” Daniel said. “That’s enough food, Jade. Don’t put another thing on this table. Come on, let’s say grace.” The family held hands around the table and Daniel thanked the Lord for everything in sight, not forgetting to add, in his mind, a thank-you for the bank loan extension.
“I’ve been missing you so much,” Olivia said, beaming smiles at her uncle and cousins. “I’m really sorry I’m going away.”
“We missed you, too,” Lynley said. “We talk about you all the time, don’t we, Winnie?”
“We do. We tell everyone about you. About you writing Aunt Anna and us finding each other. It’s like a fairy tale.”
“My friend Kevin’s in love with you,” Lynley continued. “He saw that picture of you at Jessie’s wedding and he wants to go out with you. I wish you’d stay.”
“I can’t. I feel too guilty about not seeing my grandparents. So who’s this Kevin? I could use a new boyfriend. I didn’t have much luck at Chapel Hill. What a bunch of sissies.” She had meant to say pussies, then took it back because of Daniel and Niall. Daniel talked like that, but he didn’t think women should.
“Ah, guilt, our old friend,” Niall put in. “Probably responsible for ninety percent of civilization. Art, mapmaking, God knows what all. I wonder if there has ever been a culture free from guilt.”
“Oh, stop it, Niall,” Daniel said. “Stop all that goddamn psychology bullshit.”
“Uncle Niall,” Winifred put in. “You always make a joke out of everything.”
“Go on to Oklahoma and assuage your guilt, Olivia,” Niall continued. “Then come back and we’ll all go to Sea Island for August. There, Daniel, that’s not psychological bullshit. That’s a bribe. How about it, Olivia, will you return to us in August and we’ll go to Grandmother’s house on the beach and lie in the sun and tan our legs and listen to the radio?”
“I sure would like to, but I can’t promise until I find out how long summer school lasts.”
“She’s going to learn Navajo.” Daniel had decided to be proud of it. “She says they code scientific information into computers on it.”
“Where do you get your ideas, Olivia?” Winifred asked. “You have the wildest ideas of anyone I ever met.”
“I listen,” Olivia answered. “I find out things.”
“We’re leaving in the morning for New Orleans,” Daniel said. “Maybe I’ll drive her to Tahlequah and fly home.”
“We’re going to go see my momma’s grave,” Olivia said. “We think she’d like that. Us going there together.”
“I remember when she came to visit us, the year before you were born.” Niall paused, wondering how much truth he could tell. “She was so beautiful, really startling looking. Her hair was to her waist.”
“She got pregnant with me before she came here,” Olivia said. “She was already pregnant when she was sleeping in Grandmother’s house.”
“The round room on the second floor,” Daniel put in. “Anna and Helen’s old room. That’s where we stayed that week.”
The room grew quiet. Anna was dead and Helen had run off and left her family for a poet.
“Eat some of this fried chicken,” Daniel said. “This is free-range chicken, Lynley. They were running all over the farm before Spook ran them down.”
“Oh, Uncle Daniel,” Winifred said. “You always make a joke out of everything.”
“Momma does, too,” Lynley added. “Momma and Uncle Niall are the lighthearted ones. Grandmother says so.”
“What do you hear from her?” Olivia asked, pretending to be interested in her lima beans and potatoes.
“Not much,” Winifred answered. “She keeps asking us to come up there but it isn’t ever the right time. The holidays at Harvard are the same as ours and she and Mike go off places all the time. They went to Canada to see Shakespeare at Stratford and they went to Ireland twice.”
“Once to meet his family,” Lynley added. “She liked his family. She wants us to meet them sometime.”
“I don’t think she really wants us to meet them,” Winifred said.
“They’re just living together,” Lynley said. “She never has gotten married to him. She isn’t divorced from Dad. That’s funny, isn’t it? Your own mother up in Boston living in sin.”
“Isn’t Aunt Helen ever coming home?” Olivia asked, after Lynley and Winifred had left and she and Daniel and Niall were picking up the plates and carrying them to the kitchen.
“We don’t know what Helen’s doing,” Niall said. “She won’t even talk to me.”
“The kids talk to her on the phone,” Daniel put in. “She invited them up there for Christmas but none of them went. Well, talk about something else, honey. That’s a sore subject with me.”
“She told your daddy not to come see her unless he’d promise not to drink,” Niall said to Olivia. “She really hurt his feelings.”
“Don’t go telling that, Niall. Goddamn, you’re worse than Anna to tell everything you know.”
“Anna’s dead, baby brother. You ought to stop talking about her.” Niall put his plate into the sink and began to run water over it. It was unlike Niall to be cruel. It shocked Olivia. She thought of him as an angel who never said a cruel thing. Now he was being cruel to her daddy. She put down her load of dishes and went to her daddy and put her arm around his waist. He looked down at
her, grimaced, patted her on the head, then moved away and went to work wiping off the kitchen cabinets with a dish towel.
“She asked if Helen is ever coming home,” Daniel said. “And the answer is probably no. Unless that poet gets tired of her, she won’t. She’s flown the coop. She’s got her little love nest and she doesn’t want the family messing into it. I don’t care what she does.”
“You cared when she told you not to come by when you were in Boston. It was uncalled for, and I’m angry about it whether you are or not.”
“Let it go, Niall. Have a drink. You want a glass of brandy? Leave the rest of those goddamn dishes and let’s get a nightcap. Come on, Via, stop cleaning up. She’s calling herself Via, brother. It’s her new name at Chapel Hill.”
“Except no one will call me that. I can’t get anyone to do it.”
“I’ll do it.” Niall put his arm around her waist and began to lead her toward the den. They went down the hall, past the Naguchi statue the interior decorator girlfriend had bought for Daniel, past the Walter Andersons he had inherited from Anna and the statues he had bought in Italy one drunken summer and the trophies from golf tournaments and the framed photographs of Jessie from age one to the present and the framed photographs of Olivia beginning with the first photograph he had ever seen of her. It had been taken when she was fifteen years old at the freshman-sophomore dance at Tahlequah High. Olivia stopped by the photograph now, remembering the photographer posing her for the shot and how Bobby had stood all night along the wall of the gym watching her dance with her date. The next week he had finally asked her to go to a movie with him.
The photograph was of Olivia wearing a pink silk off-the-shoulder dancing dress. Olivia had sent the photograph to her aunt Anna in New York along with a letter introducing herself. Then Anna had taken the photograph to Daniel and begun her campaign to make him acknowledge the child.
I was so manipulative, Olivia thought. I’m proud of that. Of how strong and manipulative I was and how I went after what I wanted. I wanted them to know me. I wanted to have a dad and now I have one and I’m leaving him. “A child will play with a toy for a day, then cry for another and throw that one away.” That’s what Aunt Mary Lily always said. And she’s right. All we want is something we can’t have. I guess that’s all we do until we die.
“So Aunt Helen just abandoned Lynley and Winifred and DeDe and Stacy and Kenny? That’s what you’re telling me?” Olivia turned to her Uncle Niall. “She doesn’t care what becomes of them?”
“The kids are to blame, too. They’ve been taking their dad’s side in all this. Helen’s asked them up there, but none of them will go.”
They moved on into the den, took their places on the long white sofas the interior decorator had brought from California. Daniel poured brandies for himself and Niall and a ginger ale for Olivia. “So you’re going to abandon us, too,” Niall continued. “I’m getting more like Daddy every day. I want everyone on the same block, so I can drop by and catch up on the news. Tribe by telephone, that’s what we’re developing nowadays.”
“I’m too far away from what I am, Uncle Niall. I dreamed I had on a Cherokee wedding dress and none of you even noticed. You know what the Cherokee can do? We can dig down into the ground and unearth thousands of years of our own history. Right here, where we are in North Carolina, the Cherokee have been leaving bowls and beads and arrowheads for centuries. Well, I guess I shouldn’t bring that up. Nevertheless, it’s true. The rest of the people have to cross the ocean to find their history. I don’t know. I just feel like I have to get back there.”
“Our dreams are here to guide us. God knows, I believe in that. Well, go on then, but come back to us in August. Don’t be like Helen and give up on us.”
“I won’t. I love you. I love it here. I just don’t want to lose the rest of myself. I spent my life in Tahlequah. I need to swim in my own river and ride my old horse before she dies.”
“And your grandparents,” Daniel added. “She’s right, Niall. She needs to see them. Besides, we got to go and see that baby. If Jessie won’t bring the boy to the mountain, then the mountain goes to see the boy.” He raised his brandy, smiled his most beautiful and charming smile, and proposed a toast. “To good company. And the bonds of blood.”
“Amen,” Niall said and drank.
“Amen,” Olivia added, wondering what all that meant.
Chapter 11
EARLY the next morning Olivia and Daniel started driving to New Orleans. They stuck a CD into the CD player and struck out for the Crescent City. “What has happened down here, is the wind have changed,” Aaron Neville sang. “Clouds rolled in from the north, and it’s started to rain. Rained real hard, and it rained for a real long time. Six feet of water in the streets of Evangeline. Louisiana, Louisiana, they’re trying to wash us away, they’re trying to wash us awaaaaaayyyyy.”
Daniel drove for the first six hours, then gave the wheel to Olivia and climbed in the backseat to take a nap. He pulled his long legs up onto the seat and rolled his jacket under his head for a pillow. They had shipped Olivia’s possessions to Tahlequah. She had come home from Chapel Hill with her car so full of stuff she could barely see to drive. A computer with a printer, a portable typewriter, a television set, books and clothes and shoes, and her bicycle strapped to the top.
“Oh, Louisiana, Louisiana,” Aaron sang. “They’re trying to wash us away. They’re trying to wash us awaaaaaayyyy.”
“You’re not going to Tahlequah to see some boy, are you?” Daniel asked. He had been trying to ask it for six hours and had finally gotten up his nerve. “Spook says you’re going to see a boy.”
“Spook’s a gossip. All he does is gripe about everything and gossip. And I’m not going to see a boy. The only boy I like in Tahlequah doesn’t live there anymore.”
“Well, if you were, I was going to say you could invite him to come see us. We don’t have to go to Switzerland. We could stay in Charlotte this summer. There’s a college there. You could see your folks and then come on home. I don’t need to go to Switzerland anyway. It’s too expensive over there anymore.”
“Dad, you don’t need to give me any money this summer. I can take care of myself with what I have. Well, I might need some money for books, but that’s about all.”
“Of course I’m going to give you money. I’ll give you the same allowance I’ve been giving you. I’m not broke yet, honey. I’ll let you know when I am.”
“If you get broke, I’ll get a job. I’ve worked in every store on Muskogee Avenue. I can get a job anywhere in town doing anything I want to do. Well, go on to sleep, Dad. I can drive.”
Olivia swerved to avoid a dead dog, then pushed the pedal to the floorboard. They were in the state of Alabama now, on a two-lane road that was a shortcut from Atlanta to Montgomery. “God, I love this car. I can’t believe you’re going to let me use it. I’ll take perfect care of it, Dad. I won’t let it get a scratch.”
“Well, don’t drive so fast. You scare me to death.”
“It’s okay. I’ve never had a wreck in my life. Go to sleep.”
“Don’t go over sixty-five on this road.”
“Okay. God, I can’t wait to see the baby. I bet he’s so beautiful. I bet he’s the prettiest baby in the world with Jessie and King for parents.”
“Sixty-five, honey. Sixty-five.”
“Okay. I promise. Go to sleep.” Daniel closed his eyes, sank his head down onto his chest. Olivia sang along with the music. “River have broken through, clear down to Plaquemine. Ten feet of water in the streets of Evangeline. Louisiana, Louisiana, they’re trying to wash us away. They’re trying to wash us awaaaaayyy.”
Chapter 12
SIX hours later they pulled into New Orleans, coming down Highway 59 from Hattiesburg, taking the long slow curves around the lake and past the French Quarter. They got off the expressway at Canal Street and wound their way down Saint Charles Avenue to Webster Street, where Jessie and King were living in a shotgun house pa
inted blue. There was a red swing on the porch. Confederate jasmine covered an iron fence. As they pulled up in front of the house, Jessie came out the door with the baby in her arms. She stood for a moment completely still, then walked down the stairs holding the baby out toward them. “Come look at him,” she called out. “I’m so glad you’re here. Look at him, Daddy. Isn’t he the most beautiful thing you’ve ever seen in your life?”
They hurried out of the car and surrounded her. A holy moment, hushed and uncertain. There he was, a baby boy, a whole new thing.
“Jesus,” Olivia said. “A baby.”
“Mighty nice,” Daniel added. “Mighty nice baby, honey. Nice as he can be.”
“You want to hold him?”
“In a minute. Let me get used to him first.” A car drove down Webster Street taking a lawyer home from work. Another passed full of teenagers on their way to the Quarter to get in trouble. A kid rode by on a bike. A dog barked. The bells of the Saint Charles Avenue Presbyterian Church began to ring. “Come on in,” Jessie said. “Come see our house.”
They went up the wooden stairs and across the porch and into the small high-ceilinged living room and sat down upon a sofa. The baby’s father, King Mallison, Junior, came out from the back of the house and shook hands with his father-in-law. “He weighs eight thousand four hundred and five grams, dressed,” King said. “Look at those ears, Olivia. Aren’t they something? He looks like a Volkswagen with the doors open.”
“Oh, King,” Jessie said. “Stop saying that to people. You’re just jealous of all the attention he’s getting. This woman I go to, Doctor Kaplan, says men are jealous of babies when they come. They think they’re going to get all the love. It’s like this darkness of jealousy we all have in us all the time but it comes out when something like a baby happens.”
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