I turned and studied the kitchen wall, to give myself a little time to cool off, feeling like a complete dunce. But in a town with four synagogues, well, I just thought—Levine. Breathing in and out, I read some of the clippings tacked to a corkboard.
Obadian Alwyn
b. Rumsey, England
d. 1878 @ 79
The children of killers are not killers, but children.
—Elie Wiesel
The third spear carrier on the left should believe that the play is all about
the third spear carrier on the left.
—Lawrence Olivier
Then we all sat in the dining room, at the table with the white cloth, under a cooling ceiling fan. On the wall in front of me, a print of Raoul Dufy’s “Open Window, Nice,” hung, its window looking out at a lake by a small city such as this one. Listening to the women, I helped myself to a china plate of peach slices, pimento cheese sandwiches, and a warm cream scone. My steaming cup held dark steeped lemon-lightened tea.
Kitty fanned herself with her napkin, saying it must be global warming, that she’d seen an article saying soon it might even quit snowing in Vermont in the winters. Aunt May said that was nonsense, that the last time it had been this hot in August had been 1947.
And all the while I sat there smiling, amazed to be having afternoon tea with my great aunt and her close friend Kitty Boisvert.
12
MOM NEARLY POPPED with pleasure at the news that her aunt had remembered her antecedents and invited a member of her family for a visit. Her daughter Janey, and about time.
I told her all the little details, her and Daddy, who naturally was on the other phone. What I’d worn and that I’d fixed my hair nice, and left my puppy with a friend, and taken a hostess gift of real florist roses, eight for the month of August. “Aunt May set a beautiful table, with a good white cloth, and we had tea with cream scones and little pimento-cheese sandwiches.”
“Did I ask you for the menu? The item you promised to relate about the belated visit to my only living kin was: Did you meet her beau? What did he look like? You can’t tell squat from the book jackets. They always show him walking off into the trees, that’s the trademark, you might say. Did he and May get cozy?”
Daddy interrupted, “Your Aunt May, cozy? You’ve must’ve got her mixed up with somebody else, Ida Jean. She’s a librarian. I’m saying that’s not just a job, it’s a personality is what I’m saying.”
“No,” I told mom, “Bert Greenwood didn’t join us. I believe he—isn’t much for socializing. Writers are that way. She mentioned he’d got upset recently about an article in the paper on attack dogs . . .”
“What did I tell you, hon, I read all his books.”
I cleared my throat and took a swallow of iced tea, wanting to give a little pause so they’d be listening—that is, if they wanted to hear what I was going to say. Beulah sat beside me on the living room floor, a fan blowing our hair. “A woman historian joined us, a friend of Aunt May who is doing research on funeral parlors.”
“A subject we do not want to hear one more remark about: funeral parlors.”
Mom lowered her voice. “What’s this about you’re seeing this James somebody that you just happened to mention you’ve been seeing?”
“He’s from Vermont; he’s a teacher. OK?” Of course they were going to ask a thousand questions, which I should have foreseen before ever mentioning him.
Daddy broke in, “How about his folks, where are they? What do they do?”
“I believe they’re—in the dairy business,” I said. Cows, Vermont.
“Farmers? His family’s got a spread with milk cows? You don’t think of a cold place having grazing.”
Mom hushed him. “Give the girl a break, Talbot. She’s got a boyfriend maybe who happens to be someone else from the someone here who she spent the last five years of her life married to. That’s the number one and only thing we need to know.”
“You look after yourself,” Daddy said, “hear me? You understand?”
Mom had the last word. “The next time you go over there to see her, you could take along one of Mr. Greenwood’s books, that’s nothing but a compliment, which I’m sure he’d be glad to sign to be accommodating to someone that’s in the family.”
13
Dear Mom,
I thought you and Daddy would like to see some different photos of Charlotte than the ones I sent before, and hope they will get your mind back on a matter of major interest to you and off the teacher named James, who I know only in a friendly way.
Here is the big clock on the outside wall of the old red brick store which has the Woman in the Moon on the face and different objects for the hours. So the Judge can remember that he heard the gunshot at half-past frying pan before the parade began. And here is his house, which I figured out by counting the ones he passes every morning on his way to enjoy a cup of coffee with his neighbors: the one with the gazebo, the one with the greenhouse, the one with the turrets on top. And the white frame building is the old meeting house where he has his office. Now you can see the locations as you read over the books.
Take care of yourselves, and eat lots of summer peaches for me.
Love,
Janey
* * *
What I didn’t mention to my family was that after having had the nice tea with Aunt May and her friend Kitty Boisvert, I was wild to get back to Charlotte to hunt for some connection between the books and the women.
On the way, though, wanting it to be a learning trip for Beulah as well, I took a back road off the highway so she could have a walk, a trudge really, on a winding dirt lane between an apple orchard and a horse farm. After all, there was no guarantee her blind person would live in a city with curbs, traffic lights, and crowds. She might wind up the companion to someone used to rail fences, livestock and farmland.
Once in town, Beulah perked right up. She had been here before: lots of grass, no sidewalks! I headed us straight for the library, having reread the part of The Prisoner of Charlotte where the Judge hears a gunshot just as the fire siren goes off, the ambulance wails, the town clock strikes ten, and a parade of a hundred school children with drums marches down the street and around the landmark one-room schoolhouse. When a prominent citizen turns up dead on the steps of the Congregational Church a short time later, the Judge recalls another wrong-doing committed under cover of a similar deafening din: a falsely convicted prisoner set upon by dogs during a raucous prison riot. And—this being the part that interested me now—he walks down to ask the librarian with the curly gray hair to look up the old news account of that miscarriage of justice, and confirms that he has found the secret past of the dead man, and a lead to the killer.
Afterward, the two chat together about the morning’s parade: “A cacophony of sound,” the Judge declares. To which the librarian replies, “I would rather have called it a dissonance of noise.” And standing in the well-lit library while the lady at the desk admired Beulah’s Companion Dog vest, I could imagine hearing plain as day the voices of Aunt May and her friend Kitty, because that’s exactly the way they talked. Maybe, I decided, Bert Greenwood wasn’t Aunt May’s boyfriend at all but a friend to the two women instead; perhaps they both helped him out and he put them, disguised, in his mysteries.
14
JAMES HAD BEEN to my house before, coming by to get me to walk downtown to meet Pete and the kids who hung out with them. A couple of times he’d walked me and Beulah back here, if it happened to be late and already dark. And he’d hang out with me on the porch for a bit. Not the way hanging out on the porch meant at home, because for one thing I didn’t have a swing or even chairs, and for another the two tenants above me—the creepy looking guys who couldn’t possibly be students—were liable to come clattering down the stairs at all hours, leaving beer bottle empties in the grass, making cracks under their breath.
But I hadn’t invited him for supper before. Meaning that I hadn’t asked him over before to spend t
he evening, letting whatever happened, happen. I knew at least he wasn’t the kind of person who would make me nervous entertaining in my marginal and rundown rental. Males like him, they didn’t mistake you for your surroundings. I could count on that. I’d decided on a southern supper, since that’s what I did best. Fried chicken, which meant soaking the pieces in buttermilk for a couple of hours, and soft cornbread, since I’d already have buttermilk handy, and at first I’d thought about a buttermilk chess pie, but that seemed overdoing it, and, anyway, with fresh peaches still in the market, you couldn’t beat piling them on vanilla ice cream.
So I was confident about the food, but asking somebody over in the evening, I didn’t know the rules for here. If I’d been back home, inviting somebody, say, like Ralph Smalley, the basketball player I’d been going with when Curtis came along, I’d have been completely at ease about it. We’d talk about his folks, and then we’d talk about mine, the mutual people we knew, which was most everybody, what was going on in Peachland as far as rain and fruit trees, what was going on in Greenville as far as the influx of foreigners bringing in high tech. He’d ask if I meant to keep on working at the pharmacy, like it was still some after-school job, and I’d set him straight about that. Then we’d eat. And we would have already sort of decided about going to a movie we wanted to see or taking off our clothes in a natural way.
I’d asked James for seven-thirty, that being the current time of sunset. At the summer solstice in June, we’d had over fifteen hours of daylight up here, but now, in August, we were already down to thirteen, and, scarcely a month from now, at the fall equinox, the days and night would be equal. Back home it drove me crazy when people mixed up the solstices and the equinoxes, when it barely took one minute to figure out that the equinoxes were when the sun crossed the equator and the solstices were when the sun was farthest from the equator in one direction or the other.
People didn’t realize that pharmacists had to be observant of the movements of the sun, and I know Curtis thought it was me talking astrology, but we did get triple the business of antidepressants in the summer months at home, when it got hot and muggy and you got sunburn and mosquitoes. Then, with the approach of autumn and football and the first sightings of tourists, everybody felt undepressed and we were back to the usual alimentary ailments.
The truth was, all I really wanted from this evening was to climb in bed and rut around with somebody I’d never been married to, get all tangled up with each other until we were both too worn out to do anything but drag ourselves into the kitchen, followed by a sixteen-hour nap. But how spontaneous could screwing our brains out be in this place? Having to yank the sofa apart and unfold the stiff metal hinges so it could become a lumpy double bed. Saying to James, “Excuse me, give me a hand here, could you, I’m throwing my back out.”
At the same moment that the clocks downtown struck the half hour, I heard him knock on my door. That made my heart swell a bit. Had he been driving around the block until it was exactly time? Did he park by the waterfront in order to have a run first along the lake? I’d wanted it to be dusk when he arrived, figuring it would be really dark by the time we finished eating, so that nobody could stand out front and peer through the windows. I didn’t like the fact, for entertaining a man, that my living room, which was also my bedroom, sat half a floor up from the ground and faced the street. Not that I thought the students from the university or the college would be looking in as they barreled down on skateboards or jogged up the sidewalk, still I didn’t like being on view. He looked spit-clean and held out a bunch of black-eyed Susans which he confessed came from the waterfront next door to his. When he followed me into the kitchen, stopping to pat Beulah and let her remember his shins, he saw a jar of black-eyed Susans already in the locust-view window. I admitted that I’d picked mine from the neighbor’s side of the driveway. And we smiled at having had the same impulse and acting on it.
“Something smells great,” he said, handing me his bouquet which I put in a jar next to mine.
I could compare him to boys I’d known in school all I wanted, and make fun of his nervous habits and how he had arms that wrapped around his body a couple of times, but the truth was: he looked good to me. And I liked it that not only was he tall enough to look me square in the eyes, but that he’d started to do that, instead of down or away, even when I forgot and got personal.
We took bottles of Magic Hat out on the back steps, since I’d just heard the upstairs guys squeal out of the driveway in the truck and knew we wouldn’t be harassed by them tonight. We let Beulah play around in the cool evening grass on her long leash, fetching her yellow tennis ball and bringing it back to me for another throw, until the sun slipped from sight behind the maple tree next door, and it was time for supper.
Eating with someone was a very intimate occasion. At least it was for me, being not only about the taste but also about the sensual matter of touching the food. Licking just-perfect fried chicken off your fingers, chewing southern cornbread soft as spoonbread, dripping butter, letting the citrusy taste of vine-ripened tomatoes linger on your tongue. And in the air of the warm, small kitchen of my temporary home, the odor of Green Mountain coffee and tree-ripened peaches made a scent that seemed like music. James had another beer and I had iced tea, and Beulah lapped her water, while a breeze came in the window, such a relief from the recent heat wave that it seemed a gift to be grateful for.
So, in that setting, it became the most natural impulse in the world to talk about things that mattered, things that were on our minds. I told him, which I hadn’t before, why I’d come up here, what it turned out that I’d been taking a sabbatical from. Including the news at the start of summer that my ex, who’d never given a moment’s consideration to the idea of fathering, had decided to become one in a weakened frame of mind.
James swallowed and listened attentively, and I appreciated that he’d come with his head bare, no ratty bandana, no hat tugged down to his eyebrows, his dark hair still damp and combed back. “That the reason you were crying on Father’s Day?”
It touched me that he remembered, two months later. I guess he’d kept the image in his mind of me sniffling into that soggy quilted cow-purse. “It was,” I admitted. “I’d just got the news.”
He finished the last bite of his chicken, wiping up the juice with a bit of cornbread, and I admired that he didn’t mind getting his hands greasy. After considering his plate for a time and studying the jars of yellow flowers with the black hearts, he asked, “You want to have kids?”
I shook my head, a sort of waffle, not really yes or no. “I don’t know,” I said, and I didn’t. I looked down at my puppy and had a lot of conflicting feelings that didn’t need to be looked at, not at this time on what I hoped would become our first night together.
We took bowls of fresh peaches and Ben & Jerry’s World’s Best Vanilla out on the steps, cooled now by a light wind. James did his usual routine, squirming around, needing to consider the locust tree under which Beulah was getting busy, checking to make sure he still knew how to maneuver a spoon into his mouth, trying to get the spoon to stand up on his napkin. Then he seemed to inhale a lot of night air in order to make a kind of offering: to talk about himself. “When I, uh, went over on the International Living program, I kind of did the same thing. Got away from stuff, the way you did coming here. Started over. I picked the Low Countries because everyone else had opted for France and Germany, they were the big ones back then, now it’s Asia. Then I got over there and saw my name—spelled that way, M-a-a-r-t-e-n—all over the place. There was a café, we had coffee at a café, called that, Maarten’s. And when I came back I sort of dropped the old stuff. You know?”
“Sure.”
“I was gonna learn Dutch. I was gonna go to Dartmouth, maybe, get some big international degree. But once I started working with the program, helping other kids get over there, I never got around to it. I finished school in upstate New York and came here. I been here ever since.” He sucked in his
breath and then drained his Magic Hat.
I was touched. At what it clearly cost him to open up a bit, admit he had some kind of past. Touched that he shared his own escape from whatever felt bad in his life back then. Looking at him now, white as some patient stretched out on a gurney in Emergency, I felt as if I should check him for signs of life. “Thanks,” I said, and looked away a bit to give him time to recover.
Back inside, in the kitchen, I dug my spoon into the last cool bite of ice cream, came over to him and kissed him deep on the mouth. “Sugar helps,” I suggested.
In the living room, we listened to Mary Chapin Carpenter singing “Alone But Not Lonely,” while Beulah napped at our feet, her face on James’s shoe. I talked about how much I missed my work, how I liked watching the days get shorter since we didn’t have such shifts in daylight at home, about how my puppy had added a playmate named Edgar to her life. And James went back to safe things, like what he and Pete had to do during the coming school year to get their new crop of students ready to go abroad. I liked him a lot, for going on with his life, whatever it was he’d needed to leave behind. But I’d lost the urge to ask him to help me wrestle the sofa into a bed.
Maybe another night.
15
MR. STURGIS, THE pharmacist back home, phoned me with some sad news. He’d tracked down my number from my daddy at the hardware, so that he could tell me personally. He regretted to have to let me know that Bayless, our best doctor, had passed away. No surprise to Mr. Sturgis, or to me, since both of us had heard him hacking up the lining of his lungs over the phone. Still, sad. Mr. Sturgis reported that he, along with Mr. Grady, Bayless’s patient, and a few others, would be serving as pallbears. (That’s how he said it: pallbears.) I took that last part as good news, since Mr. Grady, who happened to be a black man, might, in my parents’ day, have sat in the back of the church, it being Methodist and him used to his own African Methodist Episcopal Church, and people would have said, “Good Morning, Grady,” to him. But he wouldn’t have been a pallbearer, at the request of the deceased, whose most trying patient he must have been. Mr. Sturgis thought maybe I’d like to contact the widow, Mrs. Bayless. But it wasn’t the widow but Bayless’s nurse, who wasn’t really a nurse, that I always talked to about the doctor’s prescriptions, so I did that, I phoned her. She sounded pretty torn up, having lost her job as well as her life’s work.
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