Swimming Between Worlds

by Elaine Neil Orr

  “What happened to that book Dad was writing?” he said.

  “What book?”

  “About the Civil War.”

  He remembered?

  “It wasn’t really a book. More like a monograph.”

  “It was going to be published.”

  “The Smithsonian may have a copy of the manuscript. They didn’t publish it because he wasn’t able to revise it.”

  “You think there’s a copy in the house?”

  “Why?”

  “I always thought it might tell me something about him that I never had a chance to know.”

  “Like what?”

  “I don’t know. That’s the point.”

  We’re both searching through remnants. “What would you ask him if you could?”

  “Why he left,” Brian said, standing. He turned to Kate and she saw his silent tears.

  “He drowned,” she said softly.

  “He left us,” Brian said.

  “What do you mean?” Her throat was thick and her head was suddenly freezing. She pulled the cap back down over her hair.

  “You don’t know? Mom never told you?”

  “Told me what?”

  “He loved someone else.” Brian wiped his eyes with the back of a hand. “I still love him. I forgave him a long time ago. I had to.”

  “When did she tell you this?”

  “Way back. You didn’t know?”

  “How far back?”

  “When you went off to college. That’s why I thought you knew. I figured she waited so you didn’t have to hear about it again.”

  “You never said anything.”

  “What’s to say?”

  “Do you think he drowned on purpose?” Kate said.

  “I don’t know. I hope not. I’m sorry I brought it up.”

  Kate looked up at the sky wheeling by—bright clouds, a mockingbird.

  Farther along we’ll know more about it. Probably not, Kate thought.

  Back at the house, she recommenced searching but now with Brian’s help. She was not going to tell him about the letters. He already knew, and why add painful details to painful knowledge? There were many places where she knew the manuscript would not be found—all the places she had already searched. What if it was planted in plain sight like the purloined letter? She headed to the library. Brian was there ahead of her.

  “Oak leaves,” he said, pulling out folded sheets of waxed paper.

  “Did you do those?” Kate said.

  “Mom and I did.”

  In the interlude of Kate’s imagining her mother and Brian collecting leaves, the memory of James and last night surfaced and she shivered in a mixture of disgust and fear.

  “You cold?” Brian said.

  “One of those weird momentary chills. I’m glad you’re here.”

  By three in the afternoon they had discovered a poem by Kate in the K volume of Encyclopedia Britannica, a sketch by their father that was not discernable at first until Brian turned it sideways and they saw it was a design for the backyard gardens. They found numerous four-leaf clovers tucked in volumes that had nothing else in common except as storage for the family talisman, a recipe for Cottage Cheese Bake serving as a bookmark in a volume on the rudiments of still life painting, and Monopoly money folded inside a book about South America.

  “I put that there,” Brian said.

  “Why?”

  “I was cheating. I kept the money there and when I was behind with Mom, I’d pretend I needed to go to the bathroom and sneak in here and replenish my funds.”

  “You think Mom knew?”

  “Nah. She was too preoccupied.” Brian put the money back and returned the book to its place on the bookcase. “I can stay another night,” he said.

  “Thanks,” Kate said.

  They made a dinner of birthday party leftovers and a bottle of wine. In her bedroom, later, Kate listened to the sounds her brother made. He ran the water in the faucet brushing his teeth. Then he went back downstairs and returned soon after. She heard his steps in the hallway, coming and going. She could not hear but imagined the gentle sigh of the mattress as he lay down and the rustle of sheets. After turning out her light, she opened the curtains to the moonlight, casting the garden in blue. She had drunk one glass of wine beyond what she should have, and rather than make her sleepy it had brought her to wakefulness. She thought of James and wondered if she would regret her last words to him: Don’t call me. James would want a new house in the Atlanta suburbs. Even if he embraced her family friends—and he would, because they were the right people—still, they would be defined by his profession; she would have to join the Junior League instead of serve on a library board. Though bereft of parents, she belonged in Winston-Salem, quixotic in her ways but well thought of by the likes of Mrs. McCall, welcomed by those a generation above her who were relations of relations, as her mother had been with the Hanes family. Kate’s orphaned status allowed for her oddities. She might go years and not marry and no one would judge her. The straight and narrow would not be required of her, or if the straight at least not the narrow. No, presently, she did not regret her good-bye.

  * * *

  • • •

  THE NEXT MORNING was overcast and Kate required Brian to adorn himself with a variety of scarves and hats and sit for her as she took his photograph in the library, in the backyard, on the front porch, exploiting the soft light of these locations. Finally, he threw down his hat.

  “Enough. I want to run to the hardware store. There’s time before my bus leaves.”

  “I’ll go with you.”

  They decided to walk to town and then Kate would take the bus home and Brian would walk to the Greyhound station. Kate had a funny sense they might run into James. As they were headed up Fourth, as they came up to Broad—at any moment, the Corvette might pull up. It was a fearful hope or an exciting dread. She touched her fingertips to her cheekbones. The self-assurance she had felt the night before about her ability to live alone, guiding the ship of the Glade Street house, was dissipating quickly. She considered again the Negro woman who saw into her secret heart. On the street, she was surprised at how many people greeted Brian, but then again he had lived here all of his life until just recently.

  “Miss Monroe,” an elderly gentleman said as they slipped into Brown Rogers Dixson Hardware.

  “How do you do?” she replied.

  “Who was that?” she said, pulling on Brian’s coat sleeve.

  “I don’t remember, but I love this place,” he said. “We bought skates here, remember?”

  “Not really.” She gazed at a large assortment of hand drills.

  What she wanted was a certain amplitude in life but enough security to keep her level. Were those levels she was looking at now? Perhaps she should purchase one.

  “Hey, I’m ready to check out,” Brian said.

  “Go ahead,” she said, lifting a level and tilting it this way and that, watching the bubble in the tube of liquid as it moved one way and then the other.

  Back on the street, Brian handed her a paper bag.

  “What?” she said.

  “I noticed you needed some new light bulbs.”

  “Thanks,” she said, almost tearing up.

  “Thanks for the party. You’ve got some interesting suitors.” He grinned.

  “Tacker’s not really a suitor.”

  “Keep telling yourself that. Hey. I’ve got to go.” He gave her a hug and with nothing more than a slender satchel over his shoulder and his recent purchase, he headed down the street.

  “Get something to eat,” she said, but he didn’t reply or turn his head as her voice was taken up by the wind into the moist wintered air over the town.

  * * *

  • • •

  AT HOME, KATE fixed a pimento cheese sa
ndwich and drank the last of the wine from the previous night. She settled in the library and picked up The River Nile. In a condition of puzzled nostalgia, she examined the photographs and read the captions and bits of narrative.

  Wholly Arabic in character, Omdurman is a city of the desert. Gliding like white shadows, draped women stroll in the city. One gown, or tob, unfurls a colorful embroidered hem.

  The women’s backs were to the photographer so Kate couldn’t see their faces, but one of them raised her arm expressively and they walked with intent, the lower portion of their legs exposed.

  Following the text with his hand, a Zanzibar merchant reads the Koran in front of his shop. Most Zanzibaris are Sunni Moslems, the most numerous of Islamic sects. Islam means “surrender to God’s will.”

  The man in the photograph was barefoot.

  Kate wished she had a photograph of her father that last time at the beach. His face would tell her everything. She thought about the woman in trousers going into Thalhimers—if it was a woman. And she wondered if the women in white could tell off their suitors or postpone marriage. She expected not.

  Chapter Fifteen

  A SWARM OF crows gathered among the trash cans at the back of Hart’s, calling to the morning as if they had never seen one as good. Tacker watched as one flew off, and then another, and soon they were gone, every one, in a great gathering of wings. He looked in the direction they had flown. There was Billy Cyrus, standing in the parking lot. Yet the store was not due to open for an hour. “What do you need?” Tacker called.

  “Saw some Negroes leaving out of here couple of nights ago. Round ten o’clock,” Billy said.

  “Is that right?”

  “Three of them.”

  “You generally keep a watch on my store?”

  “Your dad’s store. I happened to be driving by.”

  “You’ve got some keen eyes.”

  “I pulled into the lot. Asked them what they were doing. One of them said he works for you. Showed me the key he’d locked up with.”

  “Well, there you have it.” Tacker was already irritated, having slept poorly since the night of Kate’s party.

  “What I’m trying to figure is why he had his friends with him.”

  “That matters to you?”

  “Ought to matter to you.”

  “Thanks for the neighborly concern. I’m not a bit worried.”

  “What happened to you?”

  “I’m not sure what you mean. I’ve got work to do.”

  Tacker entered the lounge. He’d had Saturday off and hadn’t been in Sunday. The place was cleaner than usual. Newspapers stacked. Coffee cups washed and put up. Floor swept. Even the cushions on the couch were plumped up. It was almost eerie—as if mysteriously he had awakened after his death into a more perfect rendering of life, or as if he had dreamed his life and was finally waking into it.

  Gaines stepped in.

  “Thanks for cleaning things up,” Tacker said. “How’d the meeting go?”

  “Went fine. If it’s all right with you, I need to take off today from eleven to noon. I can come back and stay later than usual.”

  Later Tacker would marvel at his lack of discernment about Gaines’s behavior, given the trail of clues the man had offered up. But Tacker was preoccupied with Kate and Billy and with his father, who had received an inconclusive result on a medical test after his annual physical revealed that his white blood cell count was way up. Tacker had learned about it from his mother after Sunday dinner.

  “If there’s no way around it,” he said. “But I have to be able to count on you.”

  He didn’t like being a boss, telling people what to do. It made him feel old.

  Gaines was gone close to three hours, but Tacker was checking inventory when he got back and didn’t have time to speak with him. He’d spent most of the day trying to decide how to act if Kate came in, but she didn’t come in. And no word from her.

  At the foursquare that evening, Tacker made up a handsome blaze in the fireplace. He cooked a steak, drank a Pabst Blue Ribbon, and let da Vinci sit in his lap as he ate. The fire he felt for Kate shifted back and forth from anger to lust and there was not much difference in the feeling one way or the other. He had another beer and thought about his own parents. How in all those years had they maintained their composure? He reran Brian’s birthday party and drank another beer, imagining Kate in her bedroom, sitting at the window, looking out, waiting for him.

  He woke on the couch, the fire long dead, da Vinci asleep on his feet. He had overslept.

  Gaines was waiting for him at the store, dressed neatly in black slacks and a gray denim shirt.

  “I went ahead and mopped. Made coffee.”

  Tacker touched his day-old beard and glanced down at the flannel trousers he had worn yesterday.

  “You’re early.”

  “Might need to take off again around noon.”

  “Is everything all right? Frances and Valentine?”

  “They’re fine.”

  “What’s so dang important you have to be gone again?” Tacker’s head hurt. “You’re not moonlighting, are you?” He spread a hand out, half expecting his fingernails to look as ill-kempt as he felt. But his hands looked perfectly sound and reliable.

  Gaines handed him a newspaper folded to display the legend: Students from Winston-Salem State Stage Lunch Counter Sit-in at Kress. Tacker stared at the grainy photograph just beneath the legend. Gaines went off to the produce section. Tacker took a sip of coffee and picked up the paper a second time. It wasn’t a newspaper he knew. Maybe it was a Negro newspaper. One of the men in the picture was Gaines. Of course. Like what happened in Greensboro. Tacker fidgeted with his shirt cuffs, feeling loopy and unprepared. Across the store, Gaines was moving his hands expertly over the citrus.

  “What are you doing?” Tacker said, coming up beside him.

  “Clearing out overripe fruit like you told me,” Gaines said.

  “No. In the paper. What are you doing?”

  “Demanding my right to be served a club sandwich, just like you.”

  Tacker put a hand to the back of his neck. “How many were there?”

  “At the sit-in? Fifteen. Students from Winston-Salem State and Atkins High.”

  “How did you get involved?”

  “I’ve been involved,” Gaines said, looking at Tacker as level as a crossbeam.

  Tacker shaved in the back of the store and put on one of the clean shirts he’d learned to keep on hand. He got to work with the butcher, filling the meat case. He’d see what happened. His father wouldn’t come across a Negro paper. Thinking about what Gaines was up to was a welcome diversion. He thought again of Chukwu and wondered what kind of ruckus he was kicking up in Ibadan these days.

  Gaines returned at two o’clock, an hour late, his collar turned inward.

  “Sorry,” he said. “A little rougher today.” He pulled the collar out to expose the tear. “Someone tried to jerk me out of my seat.” He tucked the collar back in.

  The store wasn’t busy and Gaines’s tardiness wasn’t an inconvenience, but the torn collar brought back that October morning when the man had come in for milk and ended up on the sidewalk along with the shattered glass. Someone might hurt him worse than that. Gaines was squatted in the canned-fruit section, restocking the bottom shelf.

  “You can’t keep this up,” Tacker said. “The store’s not a carousel you can get on and off of.”

  “We’re making history,” Gaines said, not looking up. “You ought to come with me.”

  “What?” Tacker said. A skim of dust dulled the cans on the shelf in front of him and he took out a handkerchief and began to wipe.

  “We close down enough lunch counters, it gets too costly for the stores.”

  “What do you mean close them down?” Tacker scanned Hart’s to see if anyon
e could hear before he squatted next to Gaines.

  “We sit down, they close the counter. They don’t sell any hot dogs. We go to the next five-and-dime and they close down that lunch counter. Put up signs: CLOSED FOR PUBLIC SAFETY. The longer we sit, the longer they don’t sell. Some folks get arrested and that clogs the system more. Reverend King called it nonviolent civil disobedience when he spoke over in Durham at White Rock Baptist.”

  “You were there?”

  “Mid-February.”

  “I’ve heard mixed stories about King,” Tacker said, picking up a can of orange juice, wiping the tin top and setting it back down.

  “Of course you have. You think white people are going to paint him pretty?”

  “It just seems risky to me,” Tacker said.

  “Ha!” Gaines said. “You want risky. I know about you. You wanted to do something important going to Africa. This grocery ain’t it.”

  “Hey,” Tacker said. “What right have you got?” He straightened back up.

  “To do what? Tell you what I think?” Gaines stood. “What right have I got to talk back to a white boy? Same right as you’ve got to talk to me.”

  The butcher at the meat case shot them a look. “Hey, hold it down,” Tacker said, unease filling his chest. “I saved you from getting beaten up a lot worse,” he said.

  “Thank you, sir,” Gaines said under his breath. “Nice playing Jesus, ain’t it?”

  Tacker’s hands felt heavy. “What do you want from me?”

  “Help us out,” Gaines said. “You could make a difference for us.”

  Tacker gazed at the stacks of fruit juice. A faint whirring noise came from the fan at the back of the store. “We’ll talk later. School’s out. The parking lot’s getting full.”

  “You tell me when,” Gaines said.