News of the Spirit

by Lee Smith

  He held his arm out to me the way people do in movies, and I took it. We walked off, leaving our shoes where they were, and went over to the huge delicious complicated cake on its own table, attended by a waiter. “Which layer, Miss?” the waiter asked, and I said, “Chocolate, please.” There was a white layer, a yellow layer, and a chocolate layer. Trust Caroline to have a fancier cake than anybody in Lewisville had ever had before.

  Tom chose chocolate, too. “Now how about a drink?” he asked.

  “I’d love some champagne,” I said.

  Tom didn’t bat an eye. He disappeared and came right back with a glass of champagne for me and one for himself. He clinked my glass in an elegant toast: “To the lovely Miss Jennifer.” This is the exact moment I fell in love. Then he quoted a real poem, which began: “A sweet disorder in the dress…” It was very long and very beautiful.

  I held my breath the whole time. At the end of the poem, I raised my glass and drained it. The champagne went straight up my nose. I started crying, and couldn’t stop.

  Tom was not at all disconcerted by my tears. He did not say “Don’t cry” or “There now.” Instead, he wiped at them gravely, scientifically, with a linen napkin. Then he took my arm again and escorted me gallantly across the grass to the front yard, where the whole crowd had gathered, with Mama up on the steps in her billowing satin gown, her hand to her forehead like an explorer, anxiously scanning the crowd.

  “Here he is!” she called inside. “Okay, dear!” And then Caroline emerged in a beige suit with a corsage, carrying her bouquet. Before I knew it, Tom had moved to her side, and flashbulbs were popping, and then she threw the bouquet straight to me. Everybody cheered. I clutched it tight, forgetting to throw my own rice, while Tom and Caroline ran the gauntlet out to their waiting limo and were rushed away to the Mountain Lake Hotel, where they would do it all night long. (Do what? I had no idea.) I saved that bouquet, though. I have it still.

  When the wedding pictures came, everybody was amused to see that Tom had gone off on his honeymoon barefooted. Nobody but me knew why. Nobody but me ever knew that he had toasted me with champagne, and said a poem to me.

  From that day forward, I loved Tom with a rapt, fierce, patient love. Sometimes I even talked myself into believing, for an hour or so at least, that Tom had married Caroline only to get closer to me, to wait for me to grow up. Other times, even I had to admit that their marriage seemed to be going okay.

  Tom got a job teaching English at a boys’ boarding school outside Charlottesville, which afforded them a nice free bungalow on campus, which Caroline immediately fixed up like a doll-house version of Mama’s house. Tom got a promotion, then another promotion and a raise. Caroline taught second grade and joined the Junior League and gave little dinner parties using all her wedding presents. When Mama and I drove up for a Saturday visit, Caroline served us shrimp salad on bone china plates with a scalloped gold edge. She told us that she and Tom were very happy, which I had no reason to doubt.

  Yet unrequited love is the easiest sort of love to hang on to, and I’d cherished mine for three years now, until it had become not only a passion but a habit. Whenever I heard Debbie Reynolds’s hit recording of “Tammy,” for instance, I’d change the words to “Tommy” in my mind:

  The old hootie-owl

  Hootie-hoos to the dove,

  Tommy, Tommy,

  Tommy’s in love…

  with me! His bare feet in the wedding pictures provided all the proof I needed. Of course I also liked the wedding pictures because I was in them, looking terrific.

  However, I hated looking at Mama and Daddy’s wedding pictures because I was not in them, because I hadn’t even existed then, a fact which threw me into as much terror as the thought of my own death. I had tried to explain this to Jinx, but she didn’t get it. Nobody got it.

  I saw myself as an island with time stretching out before me and behind me, all around me like a deep lake, mysterious and never-ending, like Lake Nantahala, where I lost my ring, where a person might lose anything. This precarious view made everything that happened to me seem very, very important. I had to see as much as I could see, learn as much as I could learn, feel as much as I could feel. I had to live like crazy all the time, an attitude that would get me into lots of trouble later. So it didn’t matter, not really, whether or not Tom loved me back. Sometimes—I knew this from observing Mama and her baby brother, Mason—you’re bound to love most the one who loves you least, and least deserves it.

  MASON WAS JUST NO GOOD. EVERYBODY KNEW IT, SINCE he had come to live with Mama and Daddy when his parents—my grandparents—died unexpectedly in the same year, many years ago. Seventeen years older than I, Mason was grown and gone by the time I was born. He had graduated from our local high school by the skin of his teeth, distinguished by nothing—no sports, no clubs. Nice girls would not date him. College was out of the question. Mason wore T-shirts and the same old leather jacket all through high school; his swept-back hair was long and greasy. Even Daddy could not get a button-down shirt or a sports jacket on him.

  Mason had been a juvenile delinquent. This thrilled me. Of course, I would have adored him if he’d been nice to me at all, but his interest in me was confined to ruffling my hair at infrequent intervals throughout my childhood and mumbling “Hey now” out of the side of his mouth. That was it. And now, after some awful fight, he and Daddy had had a “parting of the ways,” as Mama put it. Daddy was a man who stood on principle, though the rift broke Mama’s heart. I wasn’t sure what the final straw had been. I knew that Daddy had bailed Mason out of debt numerous times and had set him up in two businesses, which had, however, failed. Somewhere along the way, Mason had married “disastrously,” Mama said, a much older woman of no consequence, with three children. Her name was Gloria, but I had never met her, or even laid eyes on her. I hardly ever laid eyes on Mason, either. He lived someplace near Norfolk and worked in the shipyards, I think. He no longer showed up for holidays, and had not attended Caroline’s wedding.

  So by the time of this story, a sighting of Mason was as rare as a comet, taking place only during the daytime when Daddy was not at home. On those few occasions, Mason scared me a little—he’d grown fat and scruffy, and needed a shave. He didn’t look like a juvenile delinquent anymore but like some guy you’d see on the side of a road hitchhiking. He looked older than he was, down on his luck.

  Daddy was still officially waiting for Mason to “come around.” In the meantime, Mama gave him money. That’s what these visits were all about: money. I knew it, though Mama never said so. She received Mason privately—in her bedroom or the Florida room or the living room—anywhere I was not, which she made sure of by closing whatever door existed between me and them. When Mason left, looking shifty, Mama always seemed to have her purse nearby—on her bed, or the coffee table, or the sofa. Wherever they’d just been. I could put two and two together. She didn’t have to tell me not to tell Daddy, either; I already knew that. Just as I knew that Mason never came to see her unless he needed money, and this must have hurt her deeply.

  Mama always had a good cry the minute he left. “Oh, Jenny, honey, come here and hug your mama,” she’d call, and I would go do it, patting her plump shoulder ineffectively while she sobbed into her pink Kleenex. “That poor soul,” she’d wail, “that poor, poor soul!”

  I didn’t even like Mason by then, and couldn’t understand why Mama would waste her tears on him when she had such a brilliant and adorable daughter right there on the premises. Now, so many years later and a parent myself, I understand that there is no anguish like the anguish of not being able to make a loved one become the person you think he ought to be. It can’t be done, of course. But they had not given up on him yet, not Mama and not even Daddy. Why, Mason was barely thirty years old! Surely he’d come to his senses. Surely he’d shape up.

  In the fall of 1958, Mama and Daddy were still expecting this to happen.

  JINX AND I WERE IN MY ROOM LISTENING TO RECORDS whe
n the call came. It was a Saturday afternoon, bright and blowing outside, leaves flying everyplace. We lay stretched out flat on the shag carpet trying to figure out what in the world “Nel blu, dipinto di blu” meant, and sighing over “Fever” by Peggy Lee. We knew what that meant. I had just put “Love Me Tender” on when the phone rang. Jinx jumped up. She was hoping to hear from Stevie Burns, who had said he’d call her this weekend; I knew Jinx had made her mother promise to give him our number before she’d agree to come over to my house at all. Since summer, Jinx had, one, started her period and, two, gotten popular, just like that. She wouldn’t go spying with me anymore.

  I had a phone in my room, and Jinx grabbed it on the first ring. “Hello,” she said. Her new poodle cut gave her a heart-shaped face, eager now.

  I sat up, too, vicariously excited, thinking I might pick up some useful pointers for handling future dates. So I was watching closely as Jinx’s smiling mouth went into that frozen O, as she shut her brown eyes for a long moment before carefully replacing the receiver on its cradle.

  Downstairs, Mama started to scream.

  “Oh, Jenny.” Jinx finally spoke. “Your uncle is dead.”

  “What?” I had to think for a moment to figure out who she was talking about.

  “Mason,” she said. “Isn’t his name Mason? Mason’s been shot.”

  “Shot,” I repeated.

  “Murdered,” Jinx said.

  The word hung in the air in my bedroom, quivering along with Elvis’s voice. I turned the record player off just as Mama rushed through the bedroom door, swooping me up, smothering me with her sobs and tears.

  The story, what we could learn of it, went like a country song. Mason’s wife had left him for another man, and Mason had gone out looking for her. He’d found them at last in some bar in Norfolk, where things had turned ugly fast. Mason had pulled a knife and cut the man’s face. Then the man shot him.

  “Shot him dead?” I asked Mama.

  “No, honey. Shot him four times before he died.” Mama collapsed on my canopied bed, wailing. “He was the most adorable little boy,” she cried. “I was just a newlywed myself when he came to live with us, you know. Just a girl. Your daddy was always working, always gone. So it was just Mason and me. We grew up together. He was the sweetest boy, you can’t imagine. Maybe he was too sweet, maybe that was the problem, he just never could get along. And then all that drinking, oh Lord, it started so soon. If only—if only we—” Mama went on and on.

  Jinx sneaked out, looking panicked. She waved from the door. I sat on the side of my bed hugging Mama for what seemed like hours, until Jinx’s mother arrived. I was never so glad to see anybody in my life. Then suddenly my wild aunt Judy was there, too, serious for once; and our minister, Mr. Clyde Vereen; and then Dr. Nevins, who gave Mama some pills which shut her up all right but made her too calm, I felt.

  Mama sat downstairs on a tufted velvet love seat, where she had never sat before, at least not in my memory, vacant and glassy-eyed, asking for Daddy. Meanwhile, Aunt Judy was on the phone constantly, and Jinx’s mama answered the door.

  “Where is John?” Mama kept asking. “I just can’t understand where John is.”

  Nobody else could understand this, either. Aunt Judy couldn’t reach him out at Granddaddy’s old hunting cabin, where Daddy had gone for the night. He did this occasionally, though he’d read and reflect instead of hunt. It was his retreat.

  Finally Aunt Judy dispatched his good friend George Long to get him, but an hour and a half later George called back with the perplexing message that Daddy was not at the hunting cabin, and it didn’t look like he’d even gotten there yet. Our house was filling up with people and food; I was amazed at how fast the news spread. Jinx came back over to “be with me.” It was not until I saw her in her church dress that I realized the seriousness of what had happened.

  The phone kept ringing and people kept coming in and going out. Arrangements were made. They were sending Mason’s body over from Norfolk in a hearse. It would arrive at our local funeral home by evening. Mr. Joines, the undertaker, came in. He talked to Mama, who did not seem to understand what he was saying. She smiled and smiled, in a way that scared me. My grandmother arrived, all dressed up, and started bossing everybody around.

  There was so much going on that I barely registered the arrival of Mr. Kinney, Daddy’s foreman and “right-hand man” from the mill, still in his work clothes, holding his hat in his hands. Mr. Kinney went straight to my aunt Judy and took her aside for a whispered conference, then left without speaking to Mama or me. He ducked his head as he went out the door. And the afternoon wore on, the longest day I had ever lived through, the longest day in the world.

  It was almost night when Daddy finally came home. Jinx and I were sitting in the windowseat in the living room, balancing plates of ham sandwiches and potato salad on our knees, when a red car pulled up and stopped at the end of our walk. I thought I had seen the car before, but I couldn’t remember where. I peered out through the gathering dark. Daddy got out on the passenger side of the car and then I could see him plain in the light at the end of our walk. He looked years older than he had the day before.

  Daddy stared at our house, then opened the door and leaned down into the car to say something. He straightened up and looked at the house again. The other door of the car opened and Carroll Byrd got out, wearing pants, her hair streaming down her back. She walked around the front of the car to Daddy, who put out his arms and held her for a long time, so long I couldn’t believe it.

  Didn’t he know that this house was full of people who could look out the windows and see him, and see what he was doing? Didn’t he care? Didn’t he even care at all about Mama, or me, or anybody except himself?

  Finally, Carroll Byrd stepped away from Daddy, who touched her cheek once and then turned and came slowly up the walk, as if to his own execution. Carroll Byrd got back in her car and drove away, and I never saw her again.

  The funeral was held two days later at St. Michael’s Episcopal Church, though Mason had not been there or to any other church for many years, as far as we knew. The church was packed anyway, with Mama and Daddy’s friends and lots of people from the mill. Mason’s wife did not show up, but two of her daughters did, trashy girls in their late teens with curly red hair who cried like they meant it and told Mama that Mason had been a great stepfather to them. I know this was more important to Mama than anything else that was said at Mason’s funeral. She clung to their arms, and gave them money later.

  My oldest sister Beth could not come for the funeral, as she was nearing the end of a difficult pregnancy, but Caroline came, of course, with Tom—my beloved Tom, who immediately made himself indispensable to everybody, with his good sense and calm, reasonable manner.

  After the funeral, Tom and Grandmother stood by the door and shook hands and talked to everybody who came to our house, while Mama and Caroline sat together on the love seat and cried. They looked like beautiful strangers to me—the big disheveled blonde, the pretty girl with mascara streaking her face. My old terror came back as I realized I didn’t have a clue as to what their family had been like, how they had acted with each other, who they were before I was born. I got the same feeling in my stomach that I’d had at the beach when Jinx and I spied on Mr. Womble. Daddy talked on the telephone back in his study with the door closed, though Aunt Judy tried several times to get him to come out and “act responsible.” (Imagine Aunt Judy saying this to Daddy!)

  At length Grandmother left her post in the front hall and walked to Daddy’s study, magisterial in her black suit. I followed, slipping into the stairwell. I understood that Grandmother had been dressing for a funeral for years, and now was in her element. Grandmother went into the study and shut the door behind her. I am not sure what she said to Daddy, but it all ended with her marching out and him shouting, “Goddamnit, Mama!” and slamming the door.

  “But John!” Grandmother had apparently thought of something else to say. She turned and
tried the knob. He had locked the door. She was furious, I knew, but when she saw me, her face fell into its customary haughty expression, and she sailed into the living room without another word, to shake hands and smile some more.

  I headed to the kitchen for a Coke, and there I discovered Aunt Judy in the process of getting drunk. She’d done absolutely as much as she could, Goddamnit! she said. Now it was out of her hands entirely. Nobody could blame her.

  It seemed to be out of everyone’s hands.

  I got back to the living room just in time to hear Caroline announce her own pregnancy. Tom stood beside her, straight as a soldier, grinning from ear to ear, the bastard. I felt like I’d been kicked in the stomach.

  “Oh, John,” Mama began calling. “Oh, John!” She blew her nose on her pink Kleenex. “Oh, John, come here, darling, we’ve got some good news after all, even on this awful day! Oh, John…” she kept calling, but Daddy never came.

  I spent the night at Jinx’s. Locked in the bathroom, we smoked a whole pack of her mother’s Kents, which tasted awful. Then I slept for twelve hours solid. I awoke to find both Jinx and her mother sitting on the end of Jinx’s extra twin bed staring fixedly at me.

  “Oh, thank goodness,” Jinx’s mother said in a fuzzy, distracted way, which was not like her at all. “Oh, Jenny, honey.”

  I could tell that she knew everything, all about Daddy and Carroll Byrd, which probably meant that everybody else knew everything, too. What a big relief! I didn’t realize how hard it had been to keep such a secret until I felt the weight of it leave me like a physical thing, like a rock being lifted off the top of my head. For the first time in months, I could cry—and I did. I cried and cried and cried, for Mama and Daddy and Carroll Byrd and poor terrible scary dead Mason, who had been the sweetest child, and for myself and especially for the loss of Tom Burlington, who would never be free to love me now.