by Gwen Florio
Nora had worked in the library throughout her high school years, and the onslaught of memory – the smell of paper and ink and glue, the wall of polished wooden drawers that still held the old card catalogue, even she could see the row of screens to one side that had doubtless replaced it – left her dizzy. She perched gratefully on the same high stool behind the counter where she’d twirled back and forth as a teenager, winding a strand of hair around one finger, while Alden Tydings leaned across the desk, pretending an interest in books.
‘I can’t believe you’re still working here.’
‘I’m sure the board would love to get rid of me. Turn this whole place into a computer lab. But they don’t dare. I know all the dirty books they checked out on the sly. Every time somebody none-too-tactfully suggests I retire, I go into full dotty-old-lady mode and remind them.’
She pitched her voice high, exaggerated her hunch, and held out a hand, suddenly shaking with a feigned palsy. ‘Oh, Davey Leonard. How could I retire? There’s nothing like seeing bright young children come through these doors, alive with the light of reading. They remind me so much of you. Imagine, a boy like you, in love with the classics! What was it, dear – Fanny Hill? You know, I tried to read that book myself, but I never did understand it. All that talk about some man and his giant machine – something about the Industrial Revolution, I imagine. What’s that? Oh, you want me to stay? That’s nice, dear.’
Nora threw back her head in laughter and nearly fell off her stool. ‘I read all those books, too. But because I worked here, I never checked them out. I just read them in the stacks on my break.’
‘Oh, I know, dear. I know. I think this library is the only way most people of a certain age in Chateau got any information at all about sex. At least, until they started doing their research firsthand.’
Another sly smile. More than once, she’d shooed Nora from the library some twenty minutes before closing time – ‘It’s so quiet tonight. Why don’t I just finish things up so you can run along home?’ – and watched Nora sprint from the library and leap into Alden’s father’s station wagon, knowing full well Nora’s mother had calculated the length of the drive from the library to Quail House to the minute and there’d be hell to pay if Nora arrived any later than a quarter past. But, oh, the things that could be accomplished in those twenty stolen minutes, Alden pulling off the road into one of the gravel lanes that led into the marsh, the car shielded by waving reeds!
Miss Emily reached up and took Nora’s face in her hands, studying it for a long moment. She dropped her hands. ‘No, it doesn’t show. At least, not so most people would notice. Well done.’
‘What doesn’t show?’
‘Child. You were never stupid. Don’t start now.’
Nora had forgotten the unvarnished intelligence so at odds with the vapid mask worn by nearly all the women of a certain age in Chateau.
‘You’ve been through a terrible ordeal. How are you holding up, my dear?’
Nora swallowed, unable to speak. She could handle the imperfectly disguised curiosity of the biddies, the judgment in the barista’s eyes, the malice in Kyra’s, but genuine empathy nearly undid her. She lifted a shoulder, the shrug the only response she could manage.
Miss Emily laid an age-splotched hand, fingers cruelly knotted by arthritis, atop hers. ‘You’ll be fine. You were always strong. You take after your mother that way. You got out of this place.’
Nora started. ‘But Mother never left Chateau. Except for boarding school, anyway, and then she came right back.’
Penelope Best had taken herself off – or her parents had sent her; Nora had never been clear on that – to New England for her final two years of high school. The move mightily offended the biddies of the day, bypassing as it did the local private school hastily created when it became clear the feds weren’t kidding about desegregation, or even pedigreed Southern institutions like Madeira or St Anne’s. She’d further offended everyone by marrying upon graduation a boy she’d met at a function with a neighboring school – a guileless Vermonter who never understood that the honeyed politeness of the South masked a chill deeper than the harshest New England winter – dragging him back to Chateau, where her father installed him in a manager’s job at the crab-packing plant, leaving himself free to devote his full attention to the police force.
Miss Emily lifted an eyebrow. ‘There’s more than one way to escape this place. How is your mother? Is she recovering? So good of you to rush back to her aid.’
Her wry tone told Nora that Miss Emily knew good and well that Nora’s appearance in Chateau represented a running away from the intolerable circumstances in which she’d found herself, the same way she’d fled the unbearable news of Alden’s liaison with Kyra just a few weeks after Nora left for college.
‘I didn’t even know she’d been hurt until I got here.’
Miss Emily’s chortle was deep and appreciative. ‘That doesn’t surprise me a bit. If you hadn’t come home, chances are you’d never have heard about it at all.’
‘I know.’ Nora laughed again, relieved that they’d moved on to the subject of her mother.
But Miss Emily’s mirth ceased abruptly. ‘You’ve come back at such an awful time. That poor boy.’
No mention of Alden. Nora decided to leave it that way. ‘Is it true that Grace Evans is his aunt? Do you know his people?’
The phrase slipped unthinking from her lips. One’s people were everything in Chateau, firmly denoting place in the endless gradations of social strata, so much so that whenever Nora spoke of a new friend, her mother would inquire sharply, ‘But who are her people?’
‘Everybody knows his people. This town is full of Evanses.’
‘I went to school with some.’ All the Evanses were black, just as all the Brittinghams were white. ‘And, of course, there’s Grace. But how can he be her nephew? He was only, what, nineteen, twenty? Miss Grace is ancient. Great-nephew, maybe.’
Nora had done some imprecise math in her head. No matter how she worked it, the numbers seemed wrong.
‘Apparently, his father was one of those late-in-life surprises,’ Miss Emily said drily. ‘I understand it happens.’ She herself had never married, due to the disease that had so cruelly pretzeled her spine, even though most people now took it for a normal, if unfortunate, dowager’s hump.
Nora smoothed the flyer on the counter, pointing to the black-and-white photo under History Must Not Repeat Itself.
Emily blinked rapidly and turned her head away. ‘Yes, that’s Grace’s brother. A tragedy. And now this.’
Nora’s hand crept to her mouth at the belated comprehension of the double weight of sorrow affecting Grace. She made a mental note to send flowers, then corrected herself. Such a gesture, while acceptable in her former world of acquaintances in Denver, would seem almost insultingly distant, given her family’s long relationship with Grace. ‘To lose them both …’ she murmured.
‘She didn’t lose them,’ Emily reminded her, with the precision for which Nora simultaneously had always admired and feared her. ‘They were murdered.’
The word hung between them like an open door. Nora knew she could turn and walk away, get in her truck and drive back to Quail House, tend to her mother and ignore whatever troubling history was bubbling up anew, roiling Chateau’s placid surface. Curiosity kept her planted. An investigation would exonerate Alden. But …
She put her finger on the photo again.
‘What happened to Bobby Evans?’
Miss Emily climbed down from her stool with some difficulty and made her way to the front door. She flipped the Open sign to Closed, then turned the lights off again for good measure. Then, as she and Nora sat in the dark, she told the story of Robert Evans’s uncle.
THIRTEEN
‘It happened a little before you were born. Maybe a year or two earlier. Chateau was different then. Segregated.’
‘Wait a minute.’ Nora hated to stop her as soon as she’d started, but she was doing mor
e math in her head, harkening back to a dimly remembered college course in contemporary American studies. ‘Brown v Board of Education had to be a decade earlier.’
When Miss Emily shook her head, her entire torso swiveled with it, setting the stool in motion. ‘In Topeka. A city in the middle of the country. Not a nowhere place like this, sticking out into the ocean and cut off by the bay from the rest of the country. You can’t imagine how isolated the Eastern Shore was then. The Bay Bridge was only about ten years old, and just a single span, not the two bridges it is today. People from Washington drove over to Ocean City and Rehoboth in the summer, but not nearly as many as today, and they certainly didn’t detour to a little place like Chateau. There really wasn’t anybody to notice that Brown didn’t change a thing in Chateau. Not anybody who mattered, anyway.’
Not anybody white, she meant. Minute by minute, Nora felt herself slipping back into the old codes, all the things that didn’t need to be spelled out, just simply accepted as the way they were and always had been.
‘Every so often, somebody from the federal government would come poking around, and the school administrators would talk them blue in the face about our neighborhood schools. What that meant was, black kids – colored was the polite word back then – went to school with black, and white kids with white. The Brown case might have struck down separate but equal elsewhere in the world, but it was alive and well in Chateau.’
Nora thought back. For as long as she could remember, there’d been black kids in her classes. She said as much.
‘It’s because of what happened that year. You could say it got its start when Bobby Evans came back.’
‘What do you mean, came back? I thought he was from here.’
‘He was, but he left Chateau. The whole family – Miss Davita, Mister Gerald, Bobby and Grace – all packed up and went to Baltimore. They didn’t go farther north like a lot of people, but even Baltimore was a big improvement over Chateau back in those days.’
‘But he came back.’
Her white head bobbed. ‘Yes.’
‘For a visit?’
‘No. He was in college by then. Morgan State. Some sort of sports scholarship, if I remember correctly. He came with a group of young people from the school. They were going to spend their summer trying to desegregate Chateau. Sit at the tables in the Wagon Wheel, come down from the balcony in the movie theater, just like in the South all those years earlier. Funny how progress, such as it was, came to Alabama before it got to the Eastern Shore. Chateau didn’t have any buses, but if it had, I’m sure he and the others would have sat up front.’
She paused, and Nora remembered those pauses, the way Miss Emily had always forced her to figure out things for herself.
‘What about Grace?’
‘She came down, too, but not with the group. She was working for a newspaper in Baltimore by then, the Afro-American. They sent a columnist to write about what was happening here, and Grace came along with him. They left their parents and their baby brother back in Baltimore.’
She paused and appeared to be working out something. ‘More than a baby by then. A toddler, he must have been. After her brother was killed, Grace never went back to Baltimore. Said she wanted people here to see her face every day so they’d never forget that they’d killed her brother.’
‘Who killed him?’
The hump shifted in a shrug. Nora looked away.
‘Nobody knows. They never arrested anyone. He’d been back a couple of weeks by then. They’d staged a few actions – took a table in the Wagon Wheel, marched along Commerce Street with signs. Some reporters came over from Baltimore and up from Washington and down from Philadelphia, expecting a big story. Selma in our own backyard – that sort of thing.’
‘What happened?’
‘Nothing.’
‘What do you mean, nothing?’ The woman she’d encountered outside had said something about the town burning.
Miss Emily sniffed.
‘Nothing – at least not at first. You know this place. Everybody just looked the other way. There was barely a white soul to be seen on the streets during the marches. And at the Wagon Wheel – well, all the white people just up and left their meals right on the tables, and the owners sent the help home, turned off the lights and put up the closed sign. I guess Bobby and his friends sat there in the dark a while, and finally went home. So did those big-city reporters. No police dogs, no fire hoses, no stories.’
Nora could just imagine. Her own mother practically had a PhD in that particular Southern skill of looking the other way. ‘Pretty effective tactic. But you said, “at first.”’
‘It must have been so frustrating for those kids. Coming over here all fired up, full of idealism, ready to be heroes – or martyrs. Because, given the things going on elsewhere, that was a real possibility.’
Even Nora, who’d been born after the worst of it, knew the names Goodman, Schwerner and Chaney, who’d ended up buried in an earthen dam. Emmett Till lynched. Medgar Evers, Malcolm X and then, of course, King, who was shot dead the year she was born. Just like she knew the more recent ones – Michael Brown, Freddie Gray, Tamir Rice – names to evoke a sad shake of the head and maybe a quick comment about rogue cops, before something more pressing claimed her attention. As if there could be anything more pressing, she told herself. Not if you were the mother of a black son. Or, thinking now of Grace, the sister. And the aunt.
‘If everyone was ignoring them, what happened to Bobby Evans?’
‘His group decided to bring in someone new, someone with a national profile. A radical, a lot of people called him. Maybe even a Black Panther. Someone nobody could ignore, the way they could a bunch of college kids. Except the night before he was supposed to speak, somebody killed Bobby. Shot him dead.’
The words dropped the temperature in the library a couple of degrees. Nora rubbed at her arms, surprised not to feel goosebumps.
‘Who shot him?’
‘Nobody knows, not to this day. Black people think white people killed him. White people think his own took him out. Black-on-black crime, I suppose they’d call it now.’
‘Who’s they?’
But she knew without asking, and Miss Emily’s silence told her she knew Nora had realized it, too. ‘They’ would have been the police. And the Police Chief who signed off on that final determination?
Her grandfather.
Miss Emily watched it come to her and nodded slow confirmation.
‘Grace Evans is still waiting for someone to be held accountable for her brother’s murder. And now, her nephew’s. And everybody in town – at least everybody who remembers that time – is holding their breath, hoping half the town doesn’t go up in flames again. Which is what happened after they found Bobby’s body. The governor even called in the National Guard.’
‘How have I never heard about this?’
Emily didn’t dignify the stupidity of the question with a response. Nora tried again.
‘But this is different. There’ll be an investigation. They’ve got all those cameras now – dash cams, body cams.’
‘Not here. The referendum that would have paid for them got turned down last year.’
Nora issued a final, weak protest. ‘Things have changed.’
‘Change? In Chateau? Oh, child.’
FOURTEEN
1963
‘You’re wrong.’
Penelope’s pronouncements carried the certainty of innocence – Bobby’s interpretation – or straight-up ignorance, which was Grace’s take on them. These days, Penelope dressed when she came downstairs, sometimes even before noon, hovering in the kitchen when Grace was working there, or out on the patio when she and Bobby took a break, showing up so frequently that Grace now routinely prepared three glasses of iced tea or lemonade.
‘Change is coming,’ Penelope insisted during one of those breaks. ‘Chateau High will be integrated before Bobby and I graduate. You watch.’
Bobby and Grace exchanged g
lances.
‘Sure,’ Bobby said, one of those words that sounded like assent.
‘Won’t hold my breath,’ Grace muttered. Bobby routinely teased Penelope, mock arguing with her until her pale cheeks turned pink and the tip of her nose, always peeling from her unsuccessful attempts at tanning, went bright red.
‘You’re going to get yourself in trouble,’ Grace often warned him. ‘Messing with a white girl’s head like that. All you need to say is one thing wrong – or even just one thing she takes wrong – and’ – she snapped her fingers and nodded toward his crotch – ‘kiss Mama and Daddy’s grandkids goodbye.’
Now he lifted his iced tea in a toast. ‘Here’s to integration.’ Penelope raised her own glass in return. They both looked at Grace, who pretended to be fiddling with a hangnail.
The dog, Kathleen Mavourneen, heard the car first. She raised her head and trotted around the side of the house issuing a few warning barks. A door slammed a few seconds later. Penelope jumped up. ‘That’ll be Todd. We’re going to Ocean City today.’ The straps of her bikini peeked coyly from her sundress. It would return home wet and full of sand and sticky with salt, and it would be Grace’s job to pick it up off her bedroom floor, vacuum away the sand and wash the suit.
‘What do you see in him? Boy couldn’t hit a baseball if you hung it in front of him on a string.’
Grace hissed at her brother. Knock it off, her eyes signaled.
But Penelope just laughed. ‘I’m going to run upstairs and get my towel. Tell him I’ll be right down.’
Say please, Grace mouthed after her. ‘What?’ she said in response to Bobby’s look. ‘Would it kill her just once to ask instead of throwing orders right and left?’
‘Yeah, Grace. You tell her.’ Bobby fished an ice cube out of his glass and flicked it at her, dancing out of her reach as she lunged at him. She thought to give chase but wanted to escape to the safety of the house before Todd – even now calling for Penelope – rounded the corner.