In the Neighborhood of True

by Susan Kaplan Carlton

  I went inside to grab the towel and to change, but I did the former and not the latter. When I came back, I found Davis (on land) and Nattie (in water) deep in a conversation about the genus of the pineapple. “ ‘Ananas’ is the original name, and it means ‘excellent fruit,’ ” Davis was saying. And it made me love Davis a whole new layer of love. He didn’t just know me; he knew what to say to fact-loving Nattie on this dark, dark day.

  Nattie held the towel to her face, letting the tail of it dip into the twenty-two thousand gallons of chilly, chlorinated blue.

  “Nattie, count for me,” I said.

  “Un, deux—but you’re not changed,” she said. “Trois—”

  I dropped down, straight down, soldier-style, and gasped.

  My swirly skirt billowed out like a parachute before plastering itself against my goose bumps. I rubbed my arms, oddly happy to feel the prickles.

  Then, boom, Davis was in, too—shirt, shorts, tennis shoes.

  Nattie fluttered around us, her kicks wobbling the water’s surface.

  Davis and I sank, together, to the bottom, where it was even more Siberian.

  The thin ribbon that separated the air and the water here—gone. The ribbon that separated my heart from Davis’s—gone. Davis grabbed me around the waist and spun me, my skirt catching a tiny swell in the shallow end. The pool felt smaller with our clothes on. I blew a long trail of bubbles, saying our family names like a prayer, saying even part of the Shehecheyanu, an actual prayer, until the water between Davis and me was cloudy with air. And yet we could still see each other through the frosty, fading light.

  21

  In Search of Hickories

  I woke to an oppressive rainstorm, which seemed the right weather for a day after a bombing. Mother had fallen asleep in our room, and she was still sacked out next to Nattie. I dressed fast—a vivid grass-green jumper—and walked outside, right through a bunch of puddles, the ground smelling earthy and deep.

  The lights were off in the main house, so I parked myself on the porch, kicked off my soaked flats, and rocked. I picked at the hem of the jumper, which suddenly looked an inhuman color against the gray of the day.

  From over my shoulder, I heard an authoritative knock and turned to see Mr. Hank tapping on the window of his office with his cane. I went to him, rain-squishy shoes and all.

  He was behind his desk, dressed for work. A coffee percolator perked away on the credenza. Birdie entered the room holding the same silver tray she used to serve Nattie and me those perfect Coke floats our first weekend here. She centered the tray—with an octagonal breakfast plate of a fried egg over grits and a glass of juice—on the desk. “I didn’t know you’d be joining in, Ruth. What can I get you?”

  “Did you hear, Birdie?” From the side table I grabbed today’s paper with its all-capitals headline: jewish temple on peachtree wrecked by dynamite blast. “Are you shocked?”

  Birdie looked to the window where the rain pelted down and gave a good long sigh. “I am not shocked, I’m sorry to say. Not one bit.” She started to leave, her shoes shushing on the Oriental rug. But then she turned around. “Usually, I would find a reason to be busy in the kitchen, but my heart is heavy for you, Ruth. It’s a stone.”

  “Thanks, Birdie,” Mr. Hank said.

  Her eyes flicked from him to me. “But my heart is a stone more days than I’d care to acknowledge.”

  Then she exited quick as a match, and I was left with a stone—a boulder, a whole quarry—of worry for us all.

  Mr. Hank took the paper from me and unfurled it. “We haven’t run a banner in a long time—a headline that stretches across the whole front page.”

  “I couldn’t sleep.” I rubbed crusties out of my eyes and paced, thinking I likely wasn’t the first Landry to carve a pattern on this Oriental rug. My exhaustion was fanning the room’s gloomy mood.

  Mr. Hank poured me a coffee, black. “Me either. A bomb in Atlanta—can’t imagine who would stoop to that.”

  “Can’t imagine,” I said, but the reason I couldn’t sleep was that I could imagine. I couldn’t sleep because of the paper kangaroo and the broken glass—and because of Oren. “Mr. Hank, can I ask you something?”

  “What’s on your mind?” I noticed then he hadn’t shaved. His stubble was salt-and-pepper, and he looked ten years older than he had yesterday.

  “Davis’s brother, Oren,” I started.

  “The Georgia Tech starter?”

  The rain hit the window in bursts.

  “I think—” I studied one of the intricate paisleys on the rug. “I—I happened to be at Davis’s family hunting cabin the other night.” I glugged the not-sweet coffee, thinking of the heavy warm weight of Davis on me before we heard Oren crashing through the woods.

  Mr. Hank said not a word. He’d once told me that the way to get a source to keep talking was to be quiet, that good reporters were good listeners.

  “Oren showed up really early that morning. And”—the thought was so unlikely I had a hard time pushing it out of my mouth—“his story made no sense. Something’s off. I can feel it.”

  Mr. Hank reached to his desk and flipped open his notebook: same as Mother’s, same as mine. “Reporters don’t go on feelings, but you know that.”

  “Oren said he was out of gas. It must be ten miles from Atlanta to the cabin.”

  “What are your questions?”

  I looked at him blankly.

  “You say Oren showed up in the middle of the night and your reporter instincts went off,” he said. “Go through the who, what, when, where, why, and how—which is the most important?”

  “The how? The why? The who? It’s all important.” I put the coffee down, not able to swallow all the bitterness. I wanted to be the kind of girl who could drink coffee black, but I wasn’t. “Why did he come to the cabin? If you’re out of gas, you buy gas. You don’t run to the woods—you don’t run to the woods the same night a temple is bombed.”

  Mr. Hank tapped his cane on the rug to the beat of an unheard tune. “I spent a long year on the crime beat when I was younger. I’ll call the detective desk and ask if Oren Jefferson is on their list of suspects. But I don’t have much to tell them—a boy took a run on the night of the bombing.”

  “And another why—why did he smell so odd?” I said. “Not like smoke, but like bananas, of all things to smell like.”

  “Bananas?”

  “Bananas.”

  “Huh. Some people say the sweet-sour smell of dynamite is like bananas, but there could be a simpler explanation.”

  Some part of me smashed into a brick wall—a brick temple—because it struck me I’d smelled bananas yesterday, the too-sweet tropical smell that had wafted amid the ash. I wished I knew if Oren had a lifelong love for bananas or something, but of course I barely knew him. I only knew it made no sense that Davis’s brother would be involved in something hateful, ugly, vicious, criminal.

  Mr. Hank shifted in his chair. “Atlanta has a well-deserved reputation for civility, and many are convinced the bomb was set from outside, that native Atlantans respect and love the city too much to have done such an act. And it’s true that the Klan has, of late, been considered up-country rabble-rousers, a bunch of bigoted lunatics. I’d be surprised if a student from Covenant or Tech had reason to be involved. But—”

  “But?” The undrinkable coffee was making a move back up my throat.

  “But bigots can live anywhere. You take any thousand men around and outside the city, and at least one is going to have a skeleton in his closet that looks an awful lot like a Klansman hood.”

  From the corner table, the Teletype rang its heart-clutching clang. Five dings. “Go on.” Mr. Hank waved toward the machine. “See what we’ve got.”

  I tore the bulletin from the lug of a machine and read the first paragraph, the “lede”—intentionally misspelled, Mr. H
ank had taught me—out loud. “ ‘President Eisenhower calls upon FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover to investigate the bombing of the Atlanta temple.’ ”

  “Story’s getting bigger, not smaller,” Mr. Hank said.

  The bulletin had a raggedy edge where I’d ripped it unevenly, and I folded the top over, trying to make a straight line.

  But while my hands were on the bulletin, my mind drifted to bigger questions, like how fate had brought me to Atlanta and to Davis and to the temple. “I wouldn’t even be here if Dad hadn’t died,” I said. “Isn’t it insane?” The truth of it was so unmissable, I didn’t know how I’d missed it. “All the happiness—moonlight and magnolias, Davis, Gracie. It all comes from sadness.” I forgot about straightening the bulletin and started tearing little fingers along the paper’s side.

  “Nothing is all happiness, not even in New York,” Mr. Hank said, which seemed the perfect thing to say.

  I put the bulletin on top of Mr. Hank’s stack. My fingers were jumpy. I flipped up the underside of my jumper and considered the hem. It had a perfect line of sewing-machine stitches, but I worked my nail under one and tugged. The stitches came out in a satisfying rip. In no time, I’d yanked out half the hem, tearing away the hurt—the missing Dad, the bombed-out temple, the mystery brother, the lies I’d told and almost told.

  Keeping my eyes on the threads, I said, “Jews tear things—some Jews tear some things—when someone dies.”

  “I didn’t know that,” Mr. Hank said.

  “I think only more religious Jews do it. I think tearing your clothes is a visible way to show you are torn apart. Or maybe that’s too literal.”

  Mother honked from the motor court. I looked out to see her changed and lipsticked and behind the wheel, Nattie snuggled in tight, enough room for me in the front.

  “Go on, Ruthie,” Mr. Hank said.

  When I stood up, an impressive pile of threads rained down on the Oriental rug.

  The wipers divided the windshield into two arcs, sweeping from the center to the side, then back, a rainbow without the hues or the happiness. We pulled up to Covenant, where both flags—the US flag and the Georgia flag, with the state seal on one side and the Confederate bars and stars on the rest—drooped wet and sad from the metal pole. No one was waiting at the bench under the tree. No one was waiting anywhere.

  By the time I slipped into my chair in Mr. Sawyer’s room, the Lord’s Prayer was half over. I knew it inside out by now, like I’d been saying the words all my life.

  And by the time Davis and I met up after school, it had stopped raining. I hugged him right away, needing to feel his solidness. We leaned against the door of the Rambler, still shimmery with drizzle. “Twenty hours since I’ve done this,” he said, walking his fingers up the bottom of his now-mine jacket, under the hem of my unhemmed jumper.

  “Whoa-etta.” Five fingers on my thigh and suddenly I was back in the cabin with the thumping turntable. I stayed against him, my cheek on his shirt.

  Davis opened the passenger door, and I climbed in, remembering the zeroes on his dash Saturday night, remembering the zero clothes between us, and feeling fiercely sad those firsts were now braided together with the awfulness of yesterday and the worseness of Oren (maybe) and my pile of lies (definitely). I held the empty cuff of Davis’s jacket like a hand.

  “I keep thinking about what it would be like to wake up with you like we did that morning—to do that all the time,” Davis said. We rocketed past the big houses of West Paces Ferry, and I took in the infinite lawns, the squeaky-clean windows squeegeed by Birdies and Normas between ironing the pillowcases and serving up the lemon squares. I imagined the gardeners measuring the distance between the lined-up chaises by the backyard pools. “I’ve been thinking that nonstop,” Davis went on. “To spend all night and wake up in the morning, you still there.” At the red light, he touched my lower lip.

  “That would be”—I tried to find the right word—“impossible.”

  “Nah.” Davis drove right past Fontaine and Mr. Hank’s place. The sun slanted through the window sideways, and his face lit up. “I’ve got something to tell you, but we need a hickory tree to sit under,” he said.

  “Why hickory?” I asked instead of: Are you going to tell me you know something about me? Or us? Or Oren?

  “The leaves are kind of a miracle.”

  We pulled up in front of the stables of Chastain Park, and for a panicked second, I thought he was going to ask me to saddle up one of those horses I didn’t know how to ride.

  We walked on a curved path alongside trees with heaps of foliage—clusters of five and seven leaves, grouped together like a bouquet.

  “Hickories,” Davis said, slowly backing me up against the shaggy bark of a huge tree. “I am so in love with you, Ruth Tarbell Robb.”

  I loved that he didn’t hesitate—that he came right out with the declaration in the light of day, fully clothed, as witnessed by the hickories of the natural world.

  “Davis Jeff—wait, what’s your middle name?”

  “Edwin.”

  “Okay, good. Davis Edwin Jefferson, I love you.”

  Heat shot up my neck. How had I not known what I’d so wanted him to know about me?

  Davis Edwin took my hand, and we settled into a park bench. He pulled a small velvet box from the front pocket of his khakis. “This has been in the family.” He and his floppy hair swooped in for a quick, confident kiss.

  A breeze ruffled the hickories, and a five-leaf cluster wandered down from the sky, still damp from the day’s rain. Slowly, slowly, I opened the box. Nestled inside was a milky opal ring. “It’s so, so pretty,” I whispered.

  “It was my grandmother’s. I asked Momma if I could give it to you. A promise ring. An engaged-to-be-engaged ring. We can make it official the second you turn twenty-one.”

  “I love it,” I said, closing my hands around the ring. “I love it.” My heart zinged to thinking of our lives at twenty-one. Would I still go to Sarah Lawrence, like Mother, like Sara? Would Davis come north? Maybe Columbia? How many nights could we spend together before I turned twenty-one? A thousand, give or take?

  He slid the ring on my hand. “Left hand, third finger—that’s what Momma says about a promise ring. I love everything about you,” he said into my rain-crazed hair.

  I looked right at Davis, wanting to see myself as he saw me. But I just saw those freckles, and my eyes welled up. Would he ever have given me this ring if he knew I was Jewish? Or knew I had pieces of stained glass from the temple in the top drawer of my dresser? Or knew I worried his brother had a skeleton in his closet that looked an awful lot like a hood? All those questions were there, whether I said them or not—like the constellations Davis said were in the sky, with or without my noticing.

  We stood up, and Davis hugged me, tight and true. I tied his jacket around my waist, the leather arms like his arms. “I’m going to sleep with this, the ring and the jacket—don’t laugh.” Or do, I thought. I loved his laugh.

  He rubbed a spot on the jacket. “My heart is right here—on my sleeve.”

  “That’s the cuff.” I kissed him.

  “Still,” he said. “I gave you my heart—be careful with it.”

  22

  Perfect Smoke Rings

  “You are a vision, Ruth,” Fontaine said as she zipped me into the Magnolia gown she’d bought me that day at Lumet’s.

  We’d just come home from the hairdresser, where Frederic did up my hair, plastering the whole pouf into a chignon. Fontaine was tying and retying the sash on the gown when Mother knocked and walked into my room, a move right out of Fontaine’s playbook.

  “I thought you might rather wear a relic,” Mother said. She held her Magnolia dress. The dress I’d tried on at Fontaine’s urging on the first day of school. The dress Mother had forbidden me to wear because it represented the pinnacle of shallowness. “I ha
d it pressed—dusted the fust right out of it.”

  “Alice.” Fontaine petted the dress like it was the poodle. “You found your heart.”

  “Or lost my mind,” Mother said, but she was smiling.

  Fontaine swiped at her eyes. “After all that’s happened this last week, it’s even more important to remember the beauty in this city.”

  “I’d rather we concede the ugliness, Mother, or as you might say, the unpleasantness. But it doesn’t mean Ruth can’t wear a dress with a story.” She held it out, an offering.

  Nattie turned on the transistor radio, and Elvis himself, king of more than the casserole, serenaded us. He loved us tender.

  I slipped out of the Lumet’s dress and into Mother’s. It was the perfect blue with hints of gray. Sort of French and sort of southern and sort of sophisticated. My heart hammered against my ribs. I jumped up to see bits of myself in the mirror over the dressing table, thinking I’d last tried this dress on in the pre-Davis era, in a different season, as a different person.

  At six o’clock sharp, Davis pulled up in a very clean Rambler. I answered the door, a step ahead of the other women in the house. Davis held a pinkish-coral orchid for me. With his other hand, he wove his fingers in mine, and it was crazy how a little bit of skin-to-skin-ness launched a riot in my chest.

  He spun the ring around my not-ring finger. When Mother had seen the opal, she’d said, “Wear it on your right hand—there are no left-hand promises until you’re twenty-one.” And then she said, “And twenty-one is a lifetime away. You’ll have a college degree by then.” I moved the ring, but it didn’t change the dream.

  Davis plucked Mother’s dress away from my chest and threaded a stickpin in and out of the silk—right over the right bosom (Mrs. Drummond would be so pleased). The corsage, I realized, was the perfect color for the dress I was no longer wearing.

  “Sorry,” I whispered into his neck. “I changed my mind at the last minute—family over fashion.”