News of the Spirit

by Lee Smith

  It became clear that I was absolutely necessary to this trip, as the only remaining link between Mama and Daddy. They were trying to patch up their marriage for me, and the only way to do it seemed to be through me. So I was consulted on everything: where to spend the night, for instance, hotel or motel? I picked the Palm Courts, a pink stucco motel where Mama and I shared a tiny square room and bath, while Daddy had the same to himself. Mama got ready for bed as if she were in a trance—brushing her teeth, creaming her face with Noxzema, taking a lot of pills. As my good deed, I folded up the clothes she had just thrown over a chair, and was rewarded for this when she put them all back on the next morning, the same exact outfit—something she would never have done in the past.

  My parents asked me where we should eat lunch, whether to play the radio or not, whether to stop at the Bok Singing Tower or not (no), whether to stop at Weeki Watchee Springs or not (yes). I loved Weeki Watchee Springs, where beautiful girls swam around in underwater caverns with oxygen tanks on their backs, among the brilliant angelfish. I determined to go back when I was grown and get a swimming job.

  My parents did not come with me into the underwater viewing room at Weeki Watchee Springs. They did not appear to be at all interested in the girl divers, or the fish, or anything. They sat on the low stone wall outside the entrance waiting patiently for me to emerge, not talking, smoking. They looked like prisoners blinking in the sun. I made them wait an extra hour, until shark-feeding time, and they didn’t even complain about that.

  This is when I realized that I could make them do anything I wanted on this trip. Anything. I was in charge.

  Mama pulled out her compact and looked at herself the minute we got back in the car after Weeki Watchee Springs. “Oh, no!” she started sobbing. “I got sunburned! I didn’t think I could get sunburned so early in the year, but this Florida sun is just so hot.…” Mama went on and on. I didn’t see what she was all upset about, myself, but at least it was more than she had said so far on the whole trip. “Honey, ask your daddy if he can get me some Solarcaine and some more Noxzema,” she said to me.

  “Daddy, can you do that?” I said to Daddy, who pulled off at the very next drugstore, a huge Rexall with a big Coppertone sign over it.

  “I’ll go in,” I volunteered, and Mama thrust a ten-dollar bill over the seat at me.

  “No, I’ll go, Jenny,” Daddy said.

  “No, I’ll do it, Daddy!” I had already decided to count this as my good deed for the day. “Solarcaine and Noxzema, right?” Daddy jumped out of the car and made a grab for the money, but I danced away, waving it. “I’ll be back in a minute,” I yelled.

  “Damn it,” Daddy said.

  “Jenny, get me some more cigarettes, too,” Mama called after me.

  I took off.

  “Goddamnit,” Daddy said behind me.

  I got the Solarcaine and the Noxzema (a smell I will forever associate with Mama), plus some peanut M&M’s for myself, and went back to the car, where Mama sat bowed with her head in her hands and Daddy stood leaning against his door, smoking furiously. They had been arguing, I could tell. The words hung in the Florida air. They had started arguing probably the very minute I disappeared into the Rexall. I couldn’t leave them alone for even a minute! What a responsibility! I went around to Mama’s side of the car and put the paper bag from the Rexall and the wad of change in her lap. “Oh, honey, just keep the change,” she said, so I put it in my pocket along with the M&M’s. Good deeds are always rewarded, as cousin Glenda had told me.

  “Did you forget my cigarettes?” Mama asked.

  I cleared my throat. “No,” I said, fidgeting from one foot to the other. “You don’t need any more cigarettes, either one of you,” I announced. “You are both smoking too much, and you’ll make yourselves sick.”

  Mama gasped and started to cry.

  Daddy walked around the fancy front grillework of the Cadillac. “Now listen here, Miss,” he said, “you don’t talk to your mother that way, in case you’ve forgotten. You apologize to her, and get in the damn car, and let’s get the hell out of here.” He looked at his watch as if we had some big schedule to keep, but I knew we didn’t have any schedule at all.

  I stood my ground. “Don’t say ‘hell,’” I said. “You curse too much, too.”

  “Now just a minute,” Daddy said. “What’s going on here?” For the first time, he really looked at me.

  Mama stuck her head out the window and squinted at me, too—suddenly seeming, in spite of her puffy eyes, almost herself again. “Just what is going on here?” she asked. “And take off that damn cross, for God’s sake, Jenny. Where in the world did you get that ugly old thing, anyway?”

  “Don’t say ‘for God’s sake,’” I said. “What would Jesus think of that?”

  “Get in the goddamn car!” Daddy was gritting his teeth.

  I got in and slammed the door and prayed that Jesus would not punish Mama and Daddy for taking His name in vain, and that I could stay good enough for long enough to get them back together, and that Rayette would not miss her cross too much.

  CENTRAL FLORIDA WAS PRETTY BORING, BUT I LOVED Miami, with lots of traffic and lots of people in the streets shouting and gesturing, speaking Spanish. “Lock all the doors,” Mama instructed. “Jenny, don’t stare.” I couldn’t help it as we cruised slowly through the city in our huge, shiny, smoke-filled car like a shark at Weeki Watchee Springs, like a submarine from another civilization.

  My father never took his eyes off the road ahead. He seemed infinitely, infinitely sad to me, full of his grim resolve. He was doing the only thing he could do—I see this now—given the time and the place they lived in, and the circumstances, and all the women who depended upon him, and all the people at the mill, which Mr. Kinney was gamely running even now, in Daddy’s absence. For my father, being the man he was, no other choice was possible.

  And Mama—what was she thinking over there with her pretty blond cap of curls and her milk-glass baby-doll face wreathed in smoke, so far from everything familiar? Did she really want to patch up her marriage? Did she even understand that she had any choice in the matter? I couldn’t tell. She remained vacant-eyed and silent. When they spoke to each other, it was with an exaggerated politeness that I soon adopted, too, as if we were all sick.

  The drive was interminable. Finally I asked Daddy why we were going there for our prescribed vacation, anyway, when there were so many other places to go that were so much closer. “Well, Jenny,” Daddy said, “you know I was in the Navy”—I nodded—“in fact, I met your mother when I was in the Navy, stationed in Charleston”—I nodded again, while Mama merely widened her big blue eyes as if this were news to her—“and before Charleston, I was stationed in Key West, and I’ll tell you, I’ve always wanted to go back. It’s not like anywhere else, you’ll see. It’s very exotic. I thought it would be good for us to take a trip together to someplace completely different, the three of us, after what we’ve been through this past year. I thought we could use a little adventure.”

  Daddy stubbed out his cigarette as he said “adventure,” glancing over at Mama. She looked out the window. I was mad at him for saying “what we’ve been through this past year,” as if none of it were his own fault, as if we’d all been hit by a truck. I had to rub my cross and count backward from one hundred in order to stay good, to keep from saying something mean.

  It was easier once we could see the water. This happened after Miami. Suddenly we were on a bridge with blue water under us and on either side, and then we were on Route 1. “Originally the only way you could get to Key West was by boat or by rail, Jenny. A man named Henry Flagler started the railroad in 1905, and it took him seven years to get all the way down to Key West. You can still see the tracks right over there, see that old trestle? A storm blew the railroad away sometime in the thirties,” Daddy was saying, when Mama started to shriek.

  “Key Largo! Look, John, that sign says ‘Key Largo’! You didn’t tell me we were going to Key La
rgo, John. Oh, Jenny, isn’t this exciting?”

  I sat up. Key Largo was one of Mama’s and my all-time favorite movies.

  “Oh, stop, John! I want to take a picture.”

  Mama had a brand-new Brownie camera, which Daddy had bought her especially for this trip, but until now she hadn’t shown any interest in it. We had to pull over on the sandy side of the road while she rummaged through her overnight case to find it, and then Daddy had to read the instructions to figure out how to load it. I shaded my eyes from the sun and breathed in the fishy air and looked at a long-legged bird that hopped nearer and nearer. It expected us to give it something, so I got a nab out of Mama’s pocketbook. Mama freshened her lipstick and fluffed up her curls.

  “Okay, now.” She walked over and leaned against the sign that said ‘Key Largo’ and smiled, a big red smile that came out of nowhere.

  Daddy snapped the picture.

  “Now you get in it with me, honey,” she said to me, and I did, and Daddy took that picture, too. I still have it. There’s a palm tree behind us, and the sun is in our eyes. Then we all got back in the car and drove through Key Largo, which wasn’t much, as it turned out. It only took about two minutes.

  “I’m not sure they actually filmed it here,” said Daddy, who knew they hadn’t.

  “Oh, of course they did!” Mama said. “It’s named Key Largo, isn’t it? Silly.” For a moment, she sounded like herself again.

  Humphrey Bogart had died of cancer not even two years earlier, in 1957, ending a marriage that Mama and I were just crazy about. We knew the facts by heart. Everybody had thought Lauren Bacall was too young for him when they met in 1943 (she was only nineteen, he was forty-four), but they had been blissfully happy together, against all odds, and she had nursed him devotedly when he got cancer; on his deathbed, Bogey’s last words were for her: “Good-bye, kid.” Lauren Bacall never got over him, of course. How could she? I thought about it. Clark Gable never got over Carole Lombard, either, after she died in that tragic plane crash, though he tried to. He kept marrying other people, but nobody else ever really took. And what about Spencer Tracy, who loved Katharine Hepburn for years yet never left his wife?

  Then I had this awful thought: Why should it be any different for Daddy and Carroll Byrd? What if Daddy was just pretending to patch up the marriage, knowing he would never be able to live without Carroll Byrd? Or what if he was really trying to give her up, and couldn’t? What if he just couldn’t? I watched him carefully as he drove us down the Keys. But unlike Mama, who was all on the surface, all open, too open, I could never guess what Daddy was thinking. His face betrayed nothing.

  We ate lunch at a place called the Green Turtle Inn, which had a cannery (named Sid and Roxie’s) right across the road, where they canned turtle meat. Yuck! It was on the menu, too—turtle steak, turtle soup. Daddy ordered the turtle soup. Mama ordered a Manhattan and a cup of clam chowder, staring defiantly at Daddy. I ordered a hamburger. It was a confusing, jumbled-up restaurant, with tables and chairs that didn’t match, and all kinds of people, some of them very loud. Nobody was dressed up. It was not like any restaurant I had been to before. As we were leaving, a fight broke out at the bar. “Don’t look at anybody,” Mama said, clutching my shoulder and pushing me ahead of her, and we got out of there, and we did not look at anybody, or mention Mason.

  None of us mentioned Mason’s death, or Mama’s stay in the hospital, or Carroll Byrd. All the way down the Keys, what we did not say seemed as real as what we did say, like the shadowy railroad alongside the highway with its ghost bridges spanning the sea. I kept wishing cousin Glenda had come along, to haul everything out in the open and pray over it.

  I STARTED GETTING REALLY EXCITED ON THE SEVEN Mile Bridge, a span so long over a stretch of water so wide that it seemed we were entering another world. It had not occurred to me that water could be so many different colors of blue. I saw dark shadows (sharks? rays?) moving under it, and cloud shadows moving over it.

  We touched land briefly at Bahia Honda, then crossed the water again to Big Pine. Daddy solemnly read the road signs out loud to us, as if he were a travel guide or we were illiterate: Little Torch Key, Niles Channel, Summerland Key, Cudjoe, Sugarloaf. By now I had abandoned even Bridey Murphy and was sitting up against the front seat, so I could see everything as soon as they did.

  We crossed Stock Island and drove into Key West around suppertime. After the long stretches of water and the scruffy unpopulated keys we’d come through, Key West was disorienting, a bright buzz of color and noise.

  “Did you have a uniform like that?” I asked Daddy as a young sailor dodged in front of our big car.

  “Pretty much,” Daddy said. “In fact, that young man might have been me, thirty years ago.” This thought seemed to make him sad. He cleared his throat and went on. “You’ll see a lot of Navy personnel here right now because of the situation in Cuba, which is only ninety miles away. A dictator named Batista has just been ousted, and the rebels have taken over.”

  “Castro, right?” I already knew about this from the Weekly Readers we had to read in civics class at Repass Junior High.

  Daddy looked impressed. “Why, that’s right, Jenny. Fidel Castro is the rebel leader, a genuine hero.” Daddy was always for the people, for the underdog. His own father had kept the union out of the mill, but after Granddaddy killed himself, Daddy welcomed it. This was only one of Grandmother’s many longtime grievances against Daddy.

  We stopped for the red light at Truman and White, which gave me a chance to get a good look at all the boys in uniform along the sidewalk. Several of them were as cute as Harlan Boyd, in that same sweet country way, which made me feel funny deep down in my stomach. But nobody was as cute as Tom Burlington. Nobody would ever be as cute as Tom Burlington.

  “Well, I like Ike,” Mama said irrelevantly. This had something to do with Castro, I believe.

  It was the kind of remark that used to make Daddy smile, or pinch her cheek. Not now. Instead, he curled his lip in an ugly way. Luckily Mama did not notice; she was staring out the open window. “I just wish you’d look at all these flowers!” she said. “I have never seen such vines.”

  I hadn’t, either. Nor had I ever seen anyplace that looked like Key West, with old frame houses covered and sometimes hidden by lush vegetation, with dogs and cats and chickens running around in the streets, and piano music and laughter pouring out of open doorways. I had never seen adults riding bicycles before, yet it seemed to be a common form of transportation here. People sat on their porches and balconies or stood chatting on the sidewalks beneath big-leafed trees. The light was green and golden. Everybody seemed to have all the time in the world.

  I observed these people carefully.

  Nobody looked like us.

  “We’re almost there,” Daddy said.

  Mama reapplied her lipstick. We turned left onto Duval Street, and now I could see a glistening patch of ocean ahead. Daddy pulled into a motel called the Blue Marlin, with a huge fish on its sign. Mama and I waited in the car, under the entrance portico, while he headed for the office, tucking his shirt down in back as he went. The motel was made of blue-painted concrete, two stories in a U shape around a good-size pool featuring a diving board and a water slide and lots of lounge chairs and palm trees. “Wow, this is really nice, isn’t it?” I said to Mama, who was lighting a cigarette and didn’t answer. Still, I was hopeful. The Blue Marlin was nice. But was it nice enough to get Mama and Daddy back together? Mama smoked that whole cigarette and lit another, blowing smoke rings out her window. I watched a neon-green lizard zip up a blue concrete wall.

  “Why is this taking so long?” Mama said finally. She looked like she was about to cry.

  I was halfway out of the car, on my way to find out, when Daddy came through the plate-glass doors jingling two keys, with a funny look on his face. “Jenny, get back in the car,” he said abruptly, and I did. Then Daddy got in and closed his door and turned to look at us instead of starting the car.
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  “You’re not going to believe this, Billie,” he said slowly.

  “What? What is it? Are the girls okay?” Mama’s pretty face was an instant mask of alarm. She had had too much bad news.

  “Oh no, nothing like that.” Daddy smiled his new, distant smile. “It appears that almost this entire motel has been taken over by the cast and crew of a movie that they are shooting on location right now in Key West, over at the Navy yard. There are only four rooms they’re not occupying, and it turns out we’ve got two of them.” Daddy jingled his keys again. “They asked me a lot of questions. I had to swear that we weren’t journalists or photographers in order to stay here.”

  “Who did you say we are?” I asked. It was exactly what I had been trying to figure out.

  Daddy looked at me. “An American family,” he said firmly. I felt something very deep inside myself relax. “But Jenny,” he added in a no-nonsense voice, “I promised that man that you would not bother the stars, do you hear me? Or the crew, or anybody else. I promised because I knew that you and your mother would want to stay here. There are no other children at this motel, so you’ll just have to amuse yourself. You can meet some other kids down there, I imagine”—Daddy pointed to the beach at the end of the street—“but you can’t bring them here, and you cannot bother anybody at this motel. Is that clear?” He had his key in the ignition, yet did not turn it. I knew he was speaking as much to Mama as to me.

  “Yes,” I said.

  “Which stars?” Mama asked.

  “Well, there’s Dina Merrill,” Daddy said, “and Tony Curtis…”

  “Tony Curtis!” Mama and I squealed together. Tony Curtis had just been voted the most popular young actor in Hollywood, after the recent success of The Defiant Ones. Mama and I were crazy about Tony Curtis.

  Daddy had to grin in spite of himself. “And you just missed Janet Leigh,” he said. “She left yesterday. She was here for two weeks, apparently, on vacation. She’s not in this movie, though.”