Grace and Lucille were enormously proud, of course. Tommy Lee was lost to them, that they acknowledged, so the two women took pleasure in the thought of his going away to school and making more of himself than anyone had anticipated.
It was Queenie who was despondent, though she couldn’t, in all conscience, deny her grandson permission to attend college. In fact, using all her willpower she refused even subtly to attempt to dissuade him from his plans. She could only moon over him, and buy him more clothes than he could possibly pack in the back of the car. In fact, she bought him a new car, one with a larger trunk for that very purpose. She insisted on going up to Auburn and seeing him installed in a dormitory, though Lilah begged her not to. “Look, Queenie,” Lilah said, in as peremptory a tone as Miriam herself might have used, “he’s only gone be there for two weeks at the most.”
Queenie’s heart leaped at this thought. “Do you think so?” she cried. “You mean he’ll be so homesick that he’ll come right back to Perdido! I never did think Tommy Lee was cut out for college.”
“No,” said Lilah impatiently. “I mean he’ll be moving into a fraternity house. I bet he’s Pi Eta. Pi Eta gets all the richest boys. They give a toga party every September. So Tommy Lee will be coming back down to pick me up. He’s already promised to invite me. Of course if he pledges Pi Epsilon, they have a Polynesian night. I’d rather go to a Polynesia party than a toga party, but I still bet Tommy Lee goes Pi Eta.”
In the last week of August 1961, Tommy Lee and Queenie drove up to Auburn in Tommy Lee’s new car. Queenie saw him installed in his dormitory room, and watched with pleasure as Tommy Lee tried, with but little success, to fit his mountain of new clothes into the slim closet and the single low chest of drawers that was allotted him. Tommy Lee’s roommate showed up too, and Queenie took them both out to a catfish supper.
Queenie spent the night in the Auburn Hotel, and made Tommy Lee stay with her rather than in his room. The next day, Lucille drove up, and was offhandedly introduced to Tommy Lee’s astonished roommate as “my farm mama.” Late that afternoon, following a tearful farewell, Lucille drove Queenie back to Perdido, and sat with her on the front porch of James’s house until midnight;
“I am so lonesome,” Queenie said over and over again, “that I just cain’t face going inside, knowing that Tommy Lee isn’t gone be there.”
“You got to go inside, Mama, ‘cause I am about dead, and Grace is out there at the farm waiting up for me.”
Queenie sighed, rose from her chair, and allowed Lucille to lead her inside the house.
“I could kill Lilah Bronze for sending Tommy Lee away like that. And all Lilah wants is an escort to a party where nobody wears anything but a sheet with a grass skirt on underneath it. She could have worn that around the house here, and nobody in Perdido would have said a word about it. But no,” Queenie sighed, “she had to send Tommy Lee away.”
“Well, Mama,” said Lucille, without much sympathy, “now you know about how Grace and I felt when vou took Tommy Lee away from us.”
“Did you?” said Queenie vaguely.
“We sure did,” said Lucille as she turned to leave.
Queenie listened to her daughter’s footsteps as Lucille left the house. She heard the front door shut, heard Lucille’s tread across the front porch and down the steps. She heard Lucille move across the yard toward her car parked on the road. Lucille’s car started up, and soon the noise of the engine was lost behind the screen of ligustrum to the east.
Queenie didn’t even pretend to herself that she wanted to sleep. She wanted only to think of Tommy Lee—to think about the fact that he was up in Auburn, in a cramped little cinder-block room in the freshman dormitory, and not where he ought to be, lying comfortably in the big soft bed in the room adjoining hers; in that dim, safe corner of that old house, in the shadow of the Perdido levee. She lay awake for a long time, thinking of her grandson, remembering with pleasure how many times she had sat at the dining room table and watched him eat his breakfast, how many times they had walked together to Elinor’s for supper, how they had played double solitaire in the evening, how they had watched television or the movies at the Starlite Drive-in together, how at least five times every evening they said good-night and kissed each other before laying themselves in their beds. She thought about how every night for three years Tommy Lee had kept Carl Strickland from coming back to that house.
Tommy Lee had protected her, and now Queenie was by herself.
Queenie lay absolutely still, thinking no more of Tommy Lee but only of the fact that she was alone.
She heard, in that stillness, the dishes rattle in the kitchen cupboard. It actually wasn’t as much of a rattle as just a little vibration, but Queenie had lived too long in that house not to know when the dishes in the cupboards were disturbed. Down at the other end of the darkened hallway, beyond the dark-stained swinging door, in the closed cupboards, James’s best china was shaking with the surreptitious footsteps of someone walking as slowly and softly as he could, up and down on the front porch.
Queenie was suddenly smitten with doubt as to whether or not Lucille had locked the front door on her way out. Queenie got out of bed and crept slowly and softly to the door of her room. She peered out into the hallway toward the front of the house. All was dark, still, and silent.
She stepped out into the hallway, and the crystals on the candelabra on the dining room table chimed softly together. Queenie wasn’t afraid of that, though, for her own footsteps had caused it.
She now stepped quickly toward the front door. She could see it plainly, its white frame glowing in the dimness of that dark house, the white sheers over its glass inserts shaking almost imperceptibly from her footsteps. She could even see the key in the lock. She could even see the key in the lock turning.
Suddenly the whole house was shaking. Just on the other side of the door someone stood turning the key in the lock and stamping up and down on the porch as hard as he could, first one booted foot and then the other, again and again. The key spun around and around in the lock in a way that keys never turn; it spun quickly and then more quickly, while all the glass and china in the house rattled and chimed in the darkness. One booted foot and then the other continued to stamp up and down on the porch, so that the whole house shook and only Queenie, standing in the open double doors of the dining room, remained still and rooted. That darkened house was filled with music, music of rattling, cracking glass, a shrill tumultuous accompaniment to the tympany of those booted feet on the loosening boards of the front porch. The key still spun around and around, catching light that didn’t seem to be anywhere else in the room, and dashing it into Queenie’s staring eyes. She dizzily grabbed hold of the doorframe for support. Then Queenie saw the key pop out of the lock, and though it fell on the bare wood floor, Queenie couldn’t hear it land for the music was so loud in the house, beating in her ears. All was underlaid with the sound of the Perdido rushing along as the Perdido had never rushed before, or maybe that was only the blood in her head, rushing in pulses to the same beat the boots were making on the porch, and the quaking noise of a thousand pieces of china, and crystal, and porcelain in that darkened house.
A Meissen shepherdess on one end of the dining room mantel and her paramour at the other end bounced up and down to the time of that wild music, and as Queenie stared at the shepherdess with her docile ribboned lamb and at the shepherd with his crook and his pipes, she heard their thin piping music. The shepherd played his pipes and the sheperd-ess sang a song to the rhythm of the boots on the porch. Queenie listened to that song, and seemed to understand the words, and would have caught them for sure had not the Meissen shepherdess and the Meissen shepherd suddenly leaped into the air and fallen down, down past the edge of the mantel, down past the tiles with the painted Holland flowers, down past the polished cold grate, down past the cold ashes, down onto the hard smooth bricks of the hearth. His piping stopped and her song ended; the shepherdess and her paramour were only a littl
e heap of colored porcelain, past song and past repair.
The Sapp girl who had always fixed Tommy Lee’s breakfast arrived the next morning out of habit, even though she knew she wouldn’t be wanted. She wished she had stayed home. She found Queenie, cold and dead, on the floor in the open doorway of the dining room. Two quarters, each bearing the date 1929, were pressed over her eyes, and the key to the house was stuck in her mouth.
CHAPTER 78
College
Queenie Strickland’s will divided her fortune between her daughter, Lucille, her son, Malcolm, and her grandson, Tommy Lee Burgess. The acquisition of all that money, stock, land, and returns in the way of royalties and dividends, made no difference to the three legatees. Lucille had so long rested content with Grace, who had come into riches through her father’s will many years before, that she didn’t care to do anything at all with her new-gotten wealth. Malcolm merely said, “Miriam, you got anything you want done with this money?” When Miriam said no, Malcolm allowed Billy Bronze to continue to invest it as he saw fit. Malcolm was astonished by the monthly reports he always received from Billy, detailing his own fortune, but in the end it had no meaning for him. Money meant even less to Tommy Lee, who was unhappy at Auburn. He did not like his college courses, he still did not make friends easily, he missed Perdido dreadfully, and he mourned his grandmother sincerely. His roommate found it difficult to believe that Tommy Lee’s family had any money at all, since Tommy Lee always seemed to be broke. A glance at one of Billy Bronze’s reports, however, convinced the roommate of his error. He had never even heard of anyone who was as rich as Tommy Lee Burgess. He gave Tommy Lee a piece of good advice: “Open a checking account here at Auburn, so you don’t have to drive back down to Perdido every time you need a five-dollar bill.”
Tommy Lee might have benefited further from his roommate’s advice on other points, but things happened as Lilah had predicted. Tommy was asked to pledge the Auburn chapter of Pi Eta. For Lilah’s sake, certainly not for his own, he accepted and moved from the dormitory into the fraternity house. On initiation weekend he was stripped naked, bound hand-to-foot, tossed into the trunk of his own car, and deposited on a sandbar in the Chattahoochee River.
The following Friday, he drove down to Perdido and picked up Lilah. Toga parties were a thing of the past for Pi Eta, and the fraternity’s first party had an ante-bellum theme. This was even more to Lilah’s liking, for it allowed her to wear some of the jewelry she had amassed.
Lilah went to all the Pi Eta parties that spring, and the following autumn she attended all the Auburn football games, whether at home or away, through the courtesy of Tommy Lee. Perdido thought this all a little forward in only a high school sophomore, but Tommy Lee was her cousin, after all, and Miriam merely said, “I wish I had had Lilah’s opportunities when I was her age. I am certainly not gone try to interfere with Lilah’s pleasure.”
In the summer of 1963 Lilah got her driver’s license, and the following fall she simply drove up to Auburn to all the Pi Eta parties. She would not let Tommy Lee come home at all until Thanksgiving, for she did not want to miss anv of her weekends away from Perdido. She was furious that the death of President Kennedy caused the biggest of the Pi Eta parties to be canceled.
It came time, in the spring of 1964, for Lilah herself to apply to college. Tommy Lee assumed that she would want to come to Auburn since she seemed to like the place so much. The rest of the Caskeys, however, knew better than to make any such assumption. It wasn’t forgotten that Miriam had not announced her intention of going to school anywhere until the very day that she left Perdido. They expected no better treatment from Lilah. And they were right to do so. If Lilah had applied anywhere, she had told no one. Miriam suspected, and even confided to Elinor, “Mama, I think Miriam’s planning something.” She evidently was, for she extracted promises from Miriam and Malcolm not even to look at return addresses on the letters that arrived for her in the mail.
Elinor and Miriam would both have denied that they were growing close, but they were mature women, well-settled into their routines and their identities. Miriam was in her early forties, and Elinor, by anyone’s accounting, must have been at least twenty years older. Miriam loved coffee, in fact was almost addicted to it. She would remain at the dinner table long after everyone else had wandered off. Usually Elinor remained with her, with a cup filled with cooling coffee set before her as a pretense that she remained only for that.
“You’re going to be lonely when Lilah goes away,” Elinor warned her daughter. “You’re going to be as lonely as I was when you took her away from me.”
“You’ve gotten over it,” Miriam said with a shrug.
“Not entirely,” said Elinor. “I still miss her.”
Miriam smiled. “Do you want her back?”
“The way she is now?” asked Elinor rhetorically, shaking her head and frowning.
“What do you mean, ‘the way she is now’?”
“She used to be a sweet child,” said Elinor.
“Lilah was never sweet,” said Miriam.
“Neither were you. But at least I could keep Lilah in check when she lived over here. I didn’t always let her have her own way.”
“And I do?” asked Miriam.
“You give her anything she wants. You give her much more than she needs.”
“I like giving Lilah things,” said Miriam. “I wish Grandmama and Sister had given me things when I was her age. Everything I’ve ever gotten, I’ve had to get for myself. I’ve worked hard and I’ve earned everything I have.”
“And Lilah hasn’t worked two minutes in her entire life. She’s never earned anything.”
“Lilah graduated valedictorian of her class. I never saw a girl as smart as Lilah. She could have gone to college two years ago if they would have let her in.”
“Lilah never had to work for those grades,” said Elinor. “I’ll say it again. Lilah never had to work for anything. And I think you’ve neglected to point something out to her.”
“What is that, Mama?” asked Miriam.
Elinor didn’t answer right away, but fingered her black pearls with a smile, and seemed to savor the word Mama.
“Lilah is the only member of this family who doesn’t have anything in her own right.”
“What does that mean?” said Miriam.
“That means,” explained Elinor, “that everybody else has been left money—and left a lot of money— by somebody or other. Everybody else, even Malcolm and Tommy Lee. They’ve all got money, and a great deal of it. I’ve seen Billy’s reports every month. And Lilah’s the only one of us who doesn’t get one.”
“Aren’t you leaving her anything in your will?” asked Miriam. “She’s your granddaughter.”
“I’m not telling you what’s in my will, Miriam. You’re not going to find that out until I’m dead, and I’d advise you not to be impatient. I may be alive for a long time to come.”
“Well,” said Miriam, “someone is going to leave Lilah something. Billy—what about Billy?—who else is Billy gone leave his money to? Or Oscar. Oscar’s got plenty. I’m not worried about Lilah. You don’t think I’m gone let her go without, do you?”
“No,” said Elinor, “I don’t. I just think it might be to her advantage if you pointed out that she ought to feel just a little gratitude to you for all that you’ve done for her.”
“I’m not looking for thank-yous, Mama. And if I want one, I’ll get Lilah to send me a Hallmark card.”
“She’ll send it if you buy it—and lick the stamp.”
Miriam called Zaddie out of the kitchen, and Zaddie, without having to be told, brought out a fresh pot of coffee.
“Mama,” said Miriam, “what do you think Lilah’s going to do about college?”
“I don’t know. Why don’t you ask her?” “It’s none of my business,” said Miriam. “It’s her decision. She knows more than I do about which schools are good and which aren’t. I went to school during the war. Everything’s so
different now.” “You’ll be paying for it. You have a right to know.” “Tommy Lee thinks she’ll go to Auburn.” Elinor shook her head. “I doubt it. That’s only what Tommy Lee thinks she’ll do. Anyhow, I don’t think you need to worry about where she’s going to school. I think you ought to be worried about whether you’ll ever see her again once she does go off.”
The summer drew to a close, and still Lilah had said nothing. Toward the end of August, Miriam had to go to New York, and as a matter of course, asked if Lilah would like to accompany her. Lilah packed her bags, and she and Miriam and Malcolm left the following day. They stayed four nights at the Plaza. While Miriam attended to business during the day, Lilah led Malcolm a merry round down Fifth and up Madison avenues, shopping for clothes. Malcolm carried the packages and signed the checks, and never ventured a complaint as to how much money Lilah was spending.
On the afternoon of the fourth day, Malcolm, laden with packages, staggered behind Lilah into a restaurant on East 57th Street. When they were seated, and she had ordered him a drink, Malcolm said, “You know, Lilah, there’s one thing you’ve forgotten to buy.”
“What’s that?”
“A couple of more suitcases to get all this stuff home in.”
“I won’t have to,” said Lilah.
“What do you mean?”
“I mean I’m staying here.”
Malcolm looked around the restaurant in perplexity.
“At the Plaza? By yourself?”
“No, Malcolm, not at the Plaza and not by myself. I’m going to school here. At Barnard. That’s here in New York. It’s the girls’ college attached to Columbia. It’s a good school. Freshman orientation starts on Monday. I’ve already gotten my dorm assignment. This,” she added, indicating the packages stacked beneath the table, “is my fall wardrobe.”
It was a good thing that Malcolm’s drink was brought quickly. “Bring him another,” said Lilah to the waiter.
Malcolm took a big gulp of his first drink.
Rain Page 8