Blue Willow

by Deborah Smith

  “The pain is clear,” Little Sis concluded, pointing at his hand and tilting her head back to stare at him with narrowed eyes. “The pain of the African enslavement.”

  “I come from many generations of New Yorkers,” Mr. Tamberlaine answered, his deep voice exasperated. “There hasn’t been an African or a slave in the lot since 1798. My grandfather ran one of the largest banks in Harlem.”

  “You know what I mean. You’ve suffered the pain of racism. And you’ve been an outcast as much as a hero to your people, because you’ve succeeded in the white world.”

  “Undoubtedly.”

  “But there’s pain in your love life too. Losses. Terrible disappointments. They’re all here—you haven’t resolved them.”

  He didn’t say anything. Lily watched the rigid line of his back become a little straighter. “I’m divorced,” he allowed. “I have a mentally retarded daughter who’s been institutionalized since birth.”

  “Hah! I knew it!”

  Lily entered the room. She almost felt sorry for him. He turned when he heard her footsteps. “Miss MacKenzie,” he said gravely, and gave a little nod.

  “Don’t talk to him,” Big Sis said, and hawked tobacco juice into a coffee can balanced on her lap. “He’s odd. What’s his job—chief messenger?”

  “I am chief financial officer for Colebrook International,” Mr. Tamberlaine intoned grimly.

  Lily scrubbed her hair back and exhaled. This was going nowhere, fast. “Would y’all mind if Mr. Tamberlaine and me had some privacy?”

  “Yes,” Aunt Maude said. She had come downstairs and now commanded the parlor doorway, watching them angrily. She shook her finger at Mr. Tamberlaine. “What do you want, you henchman? What other heartache is Artemas Colebrook sending into Lily’s life?”

  “Aunt Maude!” Lily flung out her hands and looked from her to the sisters. “Please.”

  “Shut up, Maudy,” Big Sis said. “Leave ’em be. He’ll be gone soon enough.”

  Aunt Maude grunted and stomped down the hall toward the back porch. Little Sis took Big Sis by one arm. As they left the room, Little Sis peered back over one shoulder at Mr. Tamberlaine. “You have kind brown eyes. Better live up to them.”

  When they were finally alone, Tamberlaine went to a table draped in a crocheted doily and opened a bulky leather tote sitting there. Lily watched in speechless silence as he removed the Colebrook teapot and set it on the table. “He asks that you keep this. It has always been yours, he said.”

  Her eyes burned. She swallowed hard and said, “Is that the only reason he sent you? To bring that teapot back here?”

  “No.” Tamberlaine faced her. He was old enough to be her father, and she couldn’t help feeling respectful in his presence. The sadness in his face touched a chord. “I wanted to apologize to you. My idea, not his. No matter how good my intentions, I contributed to the loss of your home.”

  She exhaled wearily and sat down on a delicate little settee, knotting her hands over the bare knees that protruded from baggy cutoff jeans. “He shut himself away, so even a friend couldn’t get to him. I don’t understand all the reasons why, but it was his doing, not yours.”

  “You are very gracious. Thank you.”

  She shrugged, a miserable attempt at nonchalance. “Tell him I’ll keep the teapot.”

  Tamberlaine nodded. “He realizes you may not want to contact him again. I’d be honored if you’d contact me, should you need assistance in any way. Indeed, I’d like to keep abreast of your progress at school and anything else of importance in your life.”

  “So he can know without having to ask me himself?”

  “Yes.”

  Tamberlaine sat down in a chair near her and said, “He cares deeply about your friendship.”

  She leveled her intense, searching gaze on his. “Will you tell me about the woman he’s … involved with?”

  “What would you like to know?”

  “Her name. How old she is. Things like that.”

  He told her briefly, only the basics, and each bit of information carved a deep niche. “Is she somebody important?” Lily asked.

  “I’m not quite sure how you mean that.”

  “A society type. Well-to-do.”

  After Tamberlaine told her Glenda DeWitt’s father was a United States senator, Lily didn’t need to know anything else. She realized Tamberlaine was watching her carefully. “There’s only one thing I want you to do for me,” she said. “I want you to promise to call and let me know if he marries her.”

  “Young lady, if that is your dearest wish, you have my promise.”

  “It’s not my dearest wish.” She looked at him. “Not even close.”

  He bowed his head slightly, an acknowledgment. “Unfortunately, it’s the only one I can grant you.”

  She took the teapot into the backyard and set it on the stone walkway to the old shed that served as a garage. Aunt Maude and her sisters gathered around. They were solemn and fidgety but seemed reluctant to encourage her one way or the other. Lily pulled a loose brick from an edging on a flower bed, knelt in front of the fragile little vessel, and raised the brick over it.

  The brick crashed down. Flecks from its red surface scattered on the stone. The teapot was unharmed. She hadn’t meant to miss.

  Lily dropped the brick and sat back on her heels. She was shaking. Finally she took the teapot and hurled it across the yard. It bounced on the lawn, and the lid flew off. But it didn’t break.

  “I could get a hammer,” Aunt Maude said.

  Big Sis hissed at Maude. Little Sis came to Lily and patted her shoulders. “This is a sign, honey. It can’t be broken. It’s part of your life. Put your memories in it and keep ’em safe.”

  Lily stumbled to her feet and retrieved the pot and its lid. For the first time tears slipped down her face. She set the lid back in place and started into the house. She would pack the teapot away, use it as a challenge. When she could take it out and look at it again without hating and loving Artemas at the same time, without hurting the way she did now, she’d know she was done with him.

  She was sitting at her desk, studying for spring exams, in the small dorm room she shared with a cheerful little music major named Hai, whose family had immigrated from Vietnam during the seventies. When the phone rang, Hai answered it, laid her cello and bow aside, and handed the phone to Lily.

  “Tamberlaine calling,” the deep voice said, as always. He’d contacted her a half-dozen times over the months, just to chat, he said. As if Mr. Tamberlaine were a chatterer. Her heart stopped every time. As always, she asked immediately, “Got any interesting news?” Both he and she always knew what she meant. “None,” he always said, and then she could start breathing again.

  But this time he said instead, very kindly, “I made you a promise last spring, Lily.”

  She clung to the phone, not wanting to hear or believe, feeling the sick, icy slug of panic and the fire of defeat. Until that moment she hadn’t realized how much she’d hoped for a miracle. How naive she’d been. “He married her,” she said numbly.

  “Two days ago.” Mr. Tamberlaine paused. Then, even more gently: “May I continue to call you, from time to time?”

  “Is that what he wants?” she asked, her voice hollow.

  “May I continue to call you?”

  In evading her question, he answered it. Artemas was married now. He would not betray that loyalty, not even in some harmless way, and Mr. Tamberlaine wanted her to know it. She bowed her head. No more false hopes, not anymore. “I’ll be here, if you want to call.”

  He asked if there was anything he could tell her; anything she’d like to know. No, what did the details matter? She said good-bye and put the phone down. Her hands clenched it tightly, then surrendered.

  She was done with the past. Done with it.

  Hai’s head came only to Lily’s shoulder, and when Hai pushed her, it was like being bulldozed by a toy truck. “We’ll have fun. Go inside,” Hai commanded. “They’re no
rmal. You’ll see. Not like you think fraternity men are.”

  Lily stood resolutely on the sidewalk beside her Jeep, feeling the pinch of new high heels and a sense of muggy dread. It clung to her like the warm spring night, seeping in through the soft fabric of her white trousers and thin white blouse. The gold belt around her waist felt too tight.

  “This place looks like somebody forgot to condemn it,” she said, gazing at the shabby brick-and-wood house fronted by a half-naked lawn and old, drooping oaks. Young men in haphazard suits—some wearing jeans with their jackets and ties, some wearing shorts with jackets and no ties, one wearing a Grateful Dead T-shirt and dress slacks—were huddled around a keg of beer set on saw-horses. The women mingling with them wore everything from cocktail dresses to cutoff overalls.

  It was, Lily admitted, an appealingly bizarre group. “Move,” Hai prompted, poking her in the lower back. “What’s wrong?”

  “I’m just not psyched up for this. I don’t know what to say to all those guys.” I don’t care about meeting them, she added silently.

  “You say, ‘Give me some beer and show me where the food is.’ Come on, Lily, it’s time you developed some extracurricular activities.”

  “Give me a minute. I just want to stand here and look around.” Dingy urban streets bordered the house on two sides. Downtown Atlanta had surrounded the campus of Georgia Tech decades earlier. Now, the fringes of the campus had the seedy feel of old neighborhoods on the verge of urban decay.

  A better-kept but equally old bungalow next door seemed to be trying to hide behind huge shrubs and a tall fence. The other houses crowding up to the sidewalks and each other couldn’t be younger than World War II. Across the intersection was a flat brick house of later vintage, maybe the sixties, judging by its uninspired modernism. Old sports cars and battered sedans lined every available foot of curb space.

  “I thought fraternity houses were supposed to look like mansions,” Lily commented. “I thought that Animal House stuff was a joke.”

  “This is Georgia Tech,” Hai said impatiently, as if that explained everything. She tossed back shoulder-length hair as black as a crow’s wing. “Engineers and such. They are, hmmm, inventive.” She and Lily started up a cracked flagstone walkway to the house with the scruffy lawn.

  Elvis’s “Love Me Tender” suddenly blasted from enormous speakers on the house’s low concrete veranda. “They are loud,” Lily said, squinting.

  “They love to invite women from Agnes Scott to their parties,” Hai called over the music. “Because there still aren’t very many women students at Tech.”

  “You mean these guys are desperate for women. That’s what you mean!”

  They covered their ears and made their way onto the porch. Someone stuck a plastic cup of foamy beer into Lily’s hand. A fat, shaggy dog trotted out through a front door blocked open with a car battery. “That’s Mandy!” Hai shouted. “She’s their mascot!”

  Lily stopped to scratch Mandy’s head. The dog reared up and lapped her tongue in Lily’s beer. “I like Mandy,” Lily shouted. She carried the cup to a corner and put it down, leaving Mandy in tail-wagging happiness.

  With Hai tugging at her arm, she ventured inside. The living room was filled with people. It smelled of beer and pine cleanser, and the furniture, like the woodwork, had seen a lot of abuse. A mantel filled with intramural sports trophies decked a fireplace littered with empty beer cups. Beyond the living room was a narrow hallway lined in bulletin boards. “The women’s toilet is down that way!” Hai shouted helpfully, pointing. She led Lily in the opposite direction, through a wide doorway into some kind of communal meeting room, judging by its size, the old Ping-Pong table covered in food, and a ratty couch in front of a television set in one corner.

  There were more kegs of beer, more people, and big doors leading to an open deck above a small parking lot. Lily stepped onto the deck, grateful because Elvis’s volume was only a dull roar there. She looked down at some kind of monstrous, hulking piece of automotive machinery that squatted in the lot’s corner. She moved farther along the balcony, away from the open doors, and leaned both elbows on the wooden railing. After all she’d been through in the past year and a half—her parents’ deaths, all the changes, Artemas—she felt so lost and empty inside. The hollowness couldn’t be filled by crowds or noise. Hai wandered out and joined her, looking exasperated. “You have to make an effort!”

  “I will. Eventually.”

  Hai waved her beer at the strange piece of junk in the parking lot. “That was their entry in the Rambling Wreck Parade, at Homecoming. I don’t think it runs anymore. I don’t think it ran very well to begin with.”

  “It sets performance art back a few thousand years, but I sort of like it.”

  “This is a great place! You’ll see!” Hai pivoted, the full pink skirt of her dress whirling. “Frank! Hello! Come meet my roommate!”

  A lanky young man stepped outside and caught Hai in his arms. He wore a beautiful pinstriped suit with a gold tie bar. His dapper appearance was such a contrast to the others’ that Lily studied him with surprise.

  Winding one arm around Hai’s delicate shoulders, he gave Lily a jaunty once-over. “Hai, darlin’, I thought you just pretended to have a roommate so I couldn’t spend the night with you,” he teased. “But she actually exists.” His voice was one of those rare molasses-and-champagne drawls that must have been bred in some rich little southern town far from Atlanta. This fellow was the kind who drove a little sports coupe his daddy and mama had given him, with a country-club I.D. decal on the windshield and a FORGET, HELL! bumper sticker. He probably had more than a few ancestors named Beauregard.

  “I’m for real,” Lily said. “Are you?”

  He laughed. “Allow me to introduce myself. I’m Frank Stockman, the most charming and talented brother you’re likely to meet here tonight.”

  “Lily. Lily MacKenzie.” She stuck out a hand. He lifted it to his lips and kissed her knuckles. Lily scowled benignly and withdrew it. Hai shook her head and chuckled. “Lily, Frank’s a senior in architecture. He’s about to graduate. He’s been here so long they call him the Old Man. They let him and the other Old Man move into the attic. The two of them turned it into an incredible two-room suite. They put in skylights and a wine rack!”

  “Au contraire,” Frank drawled. “I have a wine rack. My partner in the penthouse suite prefers chocolate milk.”

  “Richard doesn’t drink?” Hai looked amazed. As an aside to Lily, she explained, “Richard’s a senior in architecture too. But he’s the opposite of Frank. Believe it or not, they’re best friends.”

  “Odd, isn’t it?” Frank said blithely. “If he weren’t such a likable bore, I’d have gotten rid of him years ago.” Frank swiveled his attention to Lily. “Speaking of Richard, I came out here on a mission. I doubt you noticed, but when you walked through what passes for our community room—” he gestured drolly toward the doors—“you were being stared at. My friend took one look at you and jabbed himself in the mouth with a barbecued chicken wing. Would you care to meet him?”

  Lily stifled her lack of enthusiasm. “I guess so, if he’s wounded or something on my account.”

  Frank gestured gallantly toward the door. “Follow me, darlin’.” As Lily walked past, he added, “Oh, and don’t mention that I set up this little introduction. He hates it when I’m devious for his own good.”

  They angled through the crowd. Lily immediately sensed their destination. The giant, ruddy-faced young man towered over everyone else, and he was staring at her from a place near the windows to the balcony. She wondered if he’d been watching her since she’d walked outside.

  His sport coat fit him badly, and the slacks he wore with it were a nondescript shade of brown. His tie was askew, and his dark hair had a cowlick. She glanced down at his shoes. Thick-soled suedes, a little scuffed. Still, his broad, handsome face had an appeal that drew her attention, and her first impression was comfortable. He reminded her of a big, frien
dly couch.

  Frank waved a hand. “Lily, this is the very honorable Richard Porter. Richard, this is Lily MacKenzie. She’s from Scott. Hai’s roommate.”

  Richard Porter’s face turned three shades of red, but he put out a huge hand. She shook it. It was a good hand, hard and callused, and he was so formal, so awkward and gentlemanly, that she wanted to pat the side of his face and tell him to relax. He reminded her of all the rugged, tongue-tied men at home, like her father, in that way.

  “You’re the tallest woman I’ve ever seen,” he said. He was gazing at her like a stunned bull, she thought. His voice was thick with an accent close to her own, and as deep as a mountain hollow. She recognized a kindred spirit. It was like a warm homecoming, something she needed desperately.

  “Where are you from, boy?” she asked.

  He looked pleased by the twang in her own voice. “North Carolina. Up around Asheville. How about you?”

  “Ever hear of MacKenzie, Georgia?”

  “Uh, no. But I’d like to hear all about it.”

  “It’s not far from Victoria. In the mountains.”

  “I’ve heard of Victoria.” He was bending close to her, trying to listen over the music. She smelled an overdose of Old Spice. She’d never known anyone under sixty who used Old Spice. It was familiar and reassuring. Dependable.

  Some jolly idiot was dancing too close, bumping her, a beer sloshing over his hand. Richard stepped between her and the bleary-eyed partyer, as effective as a wall and twice as protective. The younger, smaller frat brother bounced off Richard’s arm. Richard scowled at him. The brother looked abashed and respectful, as if he’d slammed into a monument.

  Lily pointed toward the balcony. “Want to go outside, where we can talk like normal people?”

  Richard looked relieved, and nodded.

  They sat on top of the wreck. It had a full-length car seat bolted to steel shanks. Climbing up had been her idea, and he seemed enormously impressed. Dusk deepened around them, and the lights and noise of the fraternity house seemed distant.