News of the Spirit

by Lee Smith

  THIS IS WHERE EVERYTHING GETS ALL HAZY IN MY MIND. By the time I went home from Jinx’s, Daddy was gone. I did not have to be told where he was. I knew he was with her. Mama was brightly, determinedly cheerful, wearing that same crazy smile which had scared me so much before. She was in the kitchen cooking up a storm, banging the pots around, while Dot, our maid, watched her anxiously.

  “Oh, hello, dear,” Mama said to me. “I’m making some potato soup, I think potato soup is just so comforting, and Lord knows, we can all use a little comfort, isn’t that right, Dot?”

  “Yes ma’am,” Dot said.

  Mama wore a green knit suit with lots of gold jewelry, including her famous charm bracelet. I looked to see if Daddy’s Deke pin was still on it. It was.

  “Jenny,” she said brightly to me, stirring. “Did you hear that your daddy has had to go out of town on an extended business trip? He said to give you his love and tell you he’ll be back before long. I made this potato soup for you, honey,” she added. “I know it’s your favorite.”

  It was the first time in my life that I had ever been unable to eat. Mama didn’t even try. She just sat across from me drumming her beautiful red nails on the table, rat-a-tat-tat, and sipping from a tall Kentucky Derby glass.

  I thought she had water in the glass, but it was vodka, and she filled it again as soon as the level dipped below half, and did not put it down for the next two weeks. She never quit talking, either, to me or Dot or Jinx’s mother or one or another of her friends. They had arranged it among themselves so that someone was always with her, and every day when I came home from school, there they’d be, Mama and her visitor (Buffy, Bitsy, Helen, Jane Ann, etc.), talking a mile a minute, with Dot hovering in the background. Mama kept cooking those nice little suppers for me, which we never ate. Dinnertime was my time to entertain her, though, while Dot and Mama’s friends went home to their own families, before Aunt Judy showed up to spend the night.

  Mostly we read movie magazines and talked about the lives of the stars. So much had happened lately that we had a lot to catch up on. Judy Garland was divorcing Sid Luft, and that “ideal couple,” Cary Grant and Betsy Drake, had parted, amicably though. Jean Seberg was engaged to some Frenchman she’d met in the romantic resort town of Saint-Tropez, on the French Riviera, while she was filming Bonjour Tristesse. Tyrone Power married Debbie Minardos in a little chapel in her hometown of Tunica, Mississippi.

  We were still reveling in Grace Kelly’s fairy-tale wedding to Prince Rainier, and in the Robert Wagner—Natalie Wood marriage. We could tell that Janet Leigh and Tony Curtis were truly in love; Mama explained to me that their union had brought Tony (born Bernard Schwartz) “up into a better class of people.” And Kim Novak was dating Sammy Davis, Jr., which outraged Mama. I didn’t care. I thought Kim Novak was beautiful, and planned to paint my entire room lavender, just like hers, whenever Mama would let me.

  I still could not understand how the gorgeous Marilyn Monroe could have married such a dried-up pruny old guy as Arthur Miller, though Mama said he was a brilliant egghead intellectual. “They have their charms,” she told me, sipping from her glass, ignoring the fried chicken she had just cooked.

  This was as close as Mama ever came to mentioning Daddy.

  After supper we watched television together, an unaccustomed treat since Daddy didn’t like for the television set to be on in the evenings except for Huntley—Brinkley or an occasional dramatic production. But now Mama and I watched everything, and she kept up a running commentary. Her favorites were the variety shows, where she could see the most stars. I thought Ed Sullivan and Your Hit Parade were okay, but I personally liked the Dinah Shore show the best, especially the end, where she sang, “See the U.S.A. in your Chevrolet,” and blew a big, smacking kiss to the studio audience. Mama invariably turned to me at this point and whispered, “Of course, you know Dinah has Negro blood.”

  “How do you know that?” I’d asked the first couple of times Mama said this, but all she ever answered was, “Oh, honey, everybody knows it!” Whether everybody did or not, Mama believed it implicitly, as she believed in flying saucers and reincarnation and segregation and linen napkins and Chanel No. 5 and not going swimming for one hour after eating and not having milk with fish.

  Mama and I watched television together until about nine o’clock, when Aunt Judy would show up to give Mama her pills and I’d be free to do my homework or go to bed and read for as long as I liked. I was reading By Love Possessed (pretty hot stuff), which had just arrived in a package from the Book-of-the-Month Club. I kept it under my bed.

  We went on this way for about three weeks, until that awful night when we were watching What’s My Line? together. Now, I really liked What’s My Line? I felt that its question-and-answer format offered some good pointers for a combination spy and novelist such as myself. First “the challenger” would come into the studio and sign in on the blackboard. The challenger could be a man or a woman, either one. Then words would flash up on the screen, telling the audience what the challenger did for a living. The job was always far out—one man polished jelly beans, another put sticks in Popsicles, another was a bull de-horner. I loved these jobs, which made me feel that the world was a much more open place than I had been led to believe thus far. It was clear that I was destined to go to St. Catherine’s and make my debut, but after college, who knows? I imagined going on the show myself someday as the challenger, the youngest best-selling author in the world. Anyway, the panelists asked questions to figure out the challenger’s line, such as:

  “Are you self-employed?”

  “Do you deal in services?”

  “Do people come to you? Men and women both?”

  “Are they happier when they leave?”

  “Do you need a college education to do what you do?”

  I imagined Carroll Byrd as the challenger, squirming while she tried to answer this question, cringing when Dorothy Kilgallen pointed a finger at her and cried: “You are an adulteress!”

  On the night I am thinking about, the challenger was a professional fire-eater and the panel was closing in. “Oh, he’ll get it now,” I said to Mama, because it was Bennett Cerf’s turn and he was the smartest. “Don’t you think? Hmmm? Don’t you think?”

  When Mama didn’t answer, I turned and saw that she had slumped over to one side in the easy chair, her head too far down on her shoulder, exactly like a bird with a broken neck. Her overturned drink made a spreading stain on her silk print dress. I watched while the Kentucky Derby glass rolled slowly off her lap and onto the carpet and under the coffee table. Then I got up and went to the telephone to call Aunt Judy, who didn’t answer. I let it ring and ring. Finally I realized: Aunt Judy was already on her way. I stood by the front door, not moving, until she got there.

  LOTS OF THINGS HAPPENED IMMEDIATELY AFTER THAT. Daddy appeared and took Mama out of the local hospital and drove her to a “lovely place” in Asheville, North Carolina, for a “nice little rest.” I wouldn’t even speak to him. I stayed in my room smoking cigarettes until they left. Then I had a big fight with my grandmother, refusing to stay with her and Aunt Chloë, claiming I’d rather be dead and would kill myself with a knife if they tried to make me. Nobody knew what to do. I had become a “problem child.” I hoped to stay with Jinx, of course, but Jinx’s mother announced unexpectedly that she thought this would not be a good idea just now, that Jinx and I were “not good influences” on each other. And furthermore Aunt Judy had “had it” with all of us, she said, and was off to Bermuda for a much-needed vacation. So I stayed at our house and Dot stayed in the guest room until Daddy came back and got me and took me down to visit Mama’s cousins in Repass, South Carolina, where I had never been. I wouldn’t go until Mama begged me on the phone, and then I had to. I had to do anything she wanted me to do. My mother’s cousin was named Glenda. They were sending me to her because she was a school principal whose home had “structure,” which I “needed,” and because she had a daughter about my age, w
ho was a “model girl” and would be my friend.

  I doubted this, and didn’t speak to Daddy the entire way down to South Carolina in the car, though he tried and tried to talk to me and never lost his patience, not even when he saw me spit in his Coke at a Howard Johnson’s. He looked at me sadly, solemnly, like a tragic hero. Daddy had dark circles beneath his eyes now, and his hands shook. He was supposedly living for love, but it seemed to me more like he was dying of it. I hated him. I hated him for being so weak, for loving her more than he loved us. I also hated Mama—for letting this happen, for getting sick, for going in the hospital. For abandoning me. I hated Aunt Judy for going to Bermuda, and my sisters for being so involved with their own jobs and babies and lives. I hated Jinx because she got to stay with her own happy family while I had to go live with complete strangers in South Carolina.

  I already hated everybody I knew, so I was prepared to hate cousin Glenda on sight. And what a sight she was! Though I was told I had met her before, when I was little, I couldn’t remember…and surely I would have remembered anybody as awful as this. Cousin Glenda looked like a fireplug, or maybe a built-in barbecue grill. She was five-by-five, and wore an orange suit with a flowered blouse and brown lace-up shoes when I first saw her. They were the ugliest shoes in the world. Her hair was a bright yellow lacquered helmet squished way down on her head. It was impossible for me to believe that she was related to Mama, or that they had grown up together. I had heard Mama say that she and Glenda “did not always see eye to eye” on things. Now I understood this was a huge understatement. Cousin Glenda was as hard as Mama was soft, as practical as she was flighty, as ugly as she was pretty, as mean as she was sweet.

  Cousin Glenda stood in the driveway with her arms crossed and her feet planted wide apart as we drove up. Behind her, their house was completely square, as square as she was, as if it were made out of building blocks. It was a plain two-story brick house with no shutters and no shrubbery, sitting smack in the middle of a square green yard, with a walk going up to the front door and a maple tree planted on each side.

  “I don’t want to stay here.” It was the first thing I had said all day.

  Daddy turned off the car. “Honey, it’s only for a little while. You know that. It’s just until your mama gets out of the hospital.”

  “I can’t stay here,” I said.

  “Honey, please.”

  It occurred to me that Daddy might cry.

  “Let’s get your things out,” he said. “This won’t be for long, I promise.”

  “Sure.” I sounded every bit as sarcastic as Buddy Womble.

  Cousin Glenda rolled toward us like a tank. “I’ll take that,” she said to Daddy, grabbing my suitcase. “Come on now, Jennifer,” she said to me, and I surprised myself by getting out of the car. She grabbed my elbow. Her grip was iron. “Okay, John, I’ll take care of her. Send a check every week, and call her every Sunday night. That’s it, then.”

  Cousin Glenda was talking at my father instead of to him, as if he were some lower order of being, and suddenly I felt my allegiance shifting in an alarming about-face, back toward Daddy. I felt that I could be as mean to him as I wanted to, as mean as he deserved, but I couldn’t stand for anybody else to be mean to him.

  “Daddy, Daddy, Daddy,” I said, and he stepped over to me quickly and gave me a tight, fierce hug. “It’ll be all right, Jenny. It will. It won’t be long, you’ll see.” Close up, Daddy smelled like cigarettes and Aqua Velva, his old smell, and then I loved him more than anybody in the world and wanted to die for hating him so much and spying on him and spitting in his Coke at Howard Johnson’s and for the many other awful things I’d done.

  “Come along now, Jennifer.” Cousin Glenda had a voice that made you do everything she said.

  “You’re hurting my arm.” I tried to shake her off, but she held on like a bulldog.

  “I know all about you, Miss,” she announced with a great deal of satisfaction, pulling me toward the house. “We’re going to put the quietus on you.”

  THE QUIETUS! WHAT WAS THAT? I WAS TERRIFIED. BUT I soon learned that this was simply one of cousin Glenda’s favorite sayings. She was always going to “put the quietus” on somebody, or telling somebody to “get a grip.” She’d say, “Your mother called today, Jennifer, and said how much she hated doing all the things she has to do up there, such as exercise, and I said to her, ‘Billie, get a grip!’ I just hope she was taking it in.”

  Cousin Glenda quoted herself endlessly, infatuated with her own good advice. She’d say, “That new substitute teacher came in my office all upset because we had to cut fifteen minutes off of second period for the fire drill, and I said, ‘Mr. Johnson, get a grip!’” Cousin Glenda reminded me of a blowfish, all puffed up and blustery, and I soon understood that I didn’t really need to be afraid of her. She was all hot air and good intentions. Growing up as one of Mama’s poor relations in Charleston, she had idolized Mama for her sweetness and generosity. Now that Mama was in trouble and had no brothers and sisters of her own, cousin Glenda was more than willing to step in and help her out. She would shape me up. She would make me get a grip. And for a fact, it was easier to get a grip in that household than in our own, where so many things were too slippery to hold on to and so many words were never spoken and the rules were always changing.

  The rules in cousin Glenda’s house were inflexible, and everybody toed the line. “Everybody” included her husband, Raymond, long-faced and lantern-jawed but clearly nice, who didn’t have a chance to get a word in edgewise with cousin Glenda around, repeating word for word every conversation she’d ever had. I can’t remember hearing Raymond speak once during the whole time I was there, though this can’t be true. He grinned a lot, however, as if he got a big kick out of cousin Glenda—out of us all, in fact. Raymond would never leave his wife. They had been married since they were both eighteen, and he had worked at the same job in the post office for twenty-three years. He wasn’t going anywhere.

  Rayette, my model cousin, turned out to be a junior version of her mother. One year older than I, freckled, sturdy, and curly-haired, she had a wide plain face and big cornflower-blue eyes and not one ounce of irony or guile. I knew immediately that Rayette would never understand my spying, which I would never tell her about. I hid my Davy Crockett notebook under my mattress. Rayette was fascinated by me, and especially by all my cool stuff: the red plastic case containing my 45-rpm records, my Tangee lipstick and fashionable clothes, especially the crinolines and my two appliquéd circle skirts; my castle-shaped jewelry box with its own lock and key, containing my add-a-pearl necklace and Captain Midnight decoder ring and jade paperweight and fourteen separate items (such as a ballpoint pen and a jujube wrapper) that had been touched by Tom Burlington. But Rayette did not have a jealous bone in her body. She seemed as glad to have me there as her parents were, and curiously enough, I did not mind being there, either, or obeying all the rules or following the rigid schedule.

  I loved this schedule, which included getting up at the crack of dawn because we had to catch the school bus, saying the blessing and sitting down to eat a huge breakfast of eggs and bacon and grits, and then making our own beds and washing the dishes (no Dot) before we set out through the foggy chill of the lowland South Carolina morning to stand by the road and stamp our feet and blow out our breath in puffy clouds and wait for the big yellow school bus to come blasting out of the mist like an apparition and carry us away. Back home, Daddy or Dot had always driven me to school.

  Rayette’s school was a hick school, as Jinx had predicted it would be, but as the new girl, I was more popular than I had ever been, and reveled in this development. All the girls wanted to sit next to me at lunch. All the boys bumped into me in the hall, acting dumb. A’s were easy to come by. After school, I’d stay late with Rayette for her 4-H and Tri-Hi-Y meetings—clubs I would have scorned back home. They were just beginning a sewing project in 4-H, and so I, too, got to make a terrible-looking bright yellow blouse with
a scoop neck, and sleeves that did not fit the armholes, and darts in the wrong place. I was intensely proud of myself.

  Rayette was president of Tri-Hi-Y, a Christian service club that pledged itself to goodness at every meeting and did good deeds all over the county. While I was there, they were raising money to buy an artificial leg for a little boy named Leonard Pipkin. Rayette called each meeting to order by banging on a table with a gavel. This gavel impressed me so much that I gave up espionage and literature on the spot, and vowed to be just like her. I wanted to bang on a table with my gavel, to run clubs, to wear a huge cross around my neck every day, a cross so big it would pitch me forward and weigh me down, and most of all, to be absolutely sure about everything in the world.

  The main criterion in cousin Glenda’s house was, “What would Jesus think of this?” Jesus did not think much of rock and roll, for instance. Specifically, He did not like fast records that caused young people to move their bodies in sinful ways. He hated “Whole Lot-ta Shakin’ Goin’ On,” “Wake Up, Little Susie,” and “Blue Suede Shoes,” so these had to stay in my special case, but I was allowed to play “Que Será, Será,” “April Love,” and (strangely) “The Great Pretender.” Jesus was very picky.

  He apparently prized neatness, cleanliness, and order above all things; I imagined that the plastic runners on the living room carpet and the cellophane covers on all the lampshades were His idea. I liked them myself, as they gave the living room such a weird, ghostly aspect, and the runners popped and crinkled nicely when you walked on them. Lots of things had covers in cousin Glenda’s house—the toaster, the Mixmaster, and the blender wore matching piqué jackets with rickrack around the edges; the Kleenex box and the Jergens lotion bottle had crocheted skirts; the toilets featured big fuzzy pads.

  And everything had its place. I learned this fast. Rayette burst into tears the third day I was there because I had borrowed her hairbrush (without asking) and put it back in the wrong place, and so it wasn’t exactly where it was supposed to be when she needed it. Pearl Harbor! This threw Rayette for such a loop that I never did it again, striving for a Jesusy order as great as hers. I got into it. I put my shoes in a row in my closet, as if some dainty princess were going to step into them at any minute. I rolled my socks into balls. I learned where all the dishes went, and everything in the refrigerator. I loved to fill the bird feeder and put away the groceries, both tasks that had to be done just so.