News of the Spirit

by Lee Smith

  “Hello, Alice,” he calls. “Nice to see you out!” He sinks the putt.

  I enter the Multipurpose Building and head for the library, where the writers’ group is already in progress. It has taken me longer to drive over from the Health Center than I’d supposed.

  Miss Elena is reading, but she stops and looks up when I come in, her mouth a perfect O. Everybody looks at Martha Louise.

  “Why, Alice,” Martha Louise says. She raises her eyebrows. “We didn’t expect that you would be joining us today. We heard that you were in the Health Center.”

  “I was,” I say. “But I’m out now.”

  “Evidently,” Martha Louise says.

  I ride up to the circular table, set my brake, get out my notebook, and ask Miss Elena for a copy of whatever she’s reading. Wordlessly, she slides one over. But still she does not resume. They’re all looking at me.

  “What is it?” I ask.

  “Well, Alice, last week when you were absent, we laid out some ground rules for this writing group.” Martha Louise gains composure as she goes along. “We are all in agreement here, Alice, that if this is to be a pleasant and meaningful club for all of us, we need to restrict our subject matter to what everyone enjoys.”

  “So?” I don’t get it.

  “We’ve also adopted an official name for the group.” Now Martha Louise is cheerful as a robin.

  “What is it?”

  “It’s the Happy Memories Club,” she announces, and they all nod.

  I am beginning to get it.

  “You mean to tell me—” I start.

  “I mean to tell you that if you wish to be a part of this group, Alice Scully, you will have to calm yourself down, and keep your subject matter in check. We don’t come here to be upset,” Martha Louise says serenely.

  They are all watching me closely now, Sam Hofstetter in particular. I think they expect an outburst.

  But I won’t give them the satisfaction.

  “Fine,” I say. This is a lie. “That sounds just fine to me. Good idea!” I smile at everybody.

  There is a perceptible relaxation then, an audible settling back into chairs, as Miss Elena resumes her reading. It’s a travelogue piece entitled “Shakespeare and His Haunts,” about a tour she made in England several years ago. But I find myself unable to listen. I simply can’t hear Elena, or Joy, who reads next, or even Sam.

  “Well, is that it for today? Anybody else?” Martha Louise raps her knuckles against the table.

  “I brought something,” I say, “but I don’t have copies.”

  I look at Sam, who shrugs and smiles and says I should go ahead anyway. Everybody else looks at Martha Louise.

  “Well, go on, then,” she directs tartly, and I begin.

  After Rose’s disappearance, my mother took to her bed and turned her face to the wall, leaving me in charge of everything. Oh, how I worked! I worked like a dog, long hours, a cruelly unnatural life for a spirited young woman. Yet I persevered. People in the town, including our minister, complimented me; I was discussed and admired. Our boardinghouse stayed full, and somehow I managed, with Ocie’s help, to get the meals on the table. I smiled and chattered at mealtime. Yet inside I was starving, starving for love and life.

  Thus it is not surprising, I suppose, that I should fall for the first man who showed any interest in me. He was a schoolteacher who had been educated at the University in Charlottesville, a thin, dreamy young man from one of the finest families in Virginia. His grandfather had been the governor. He used to sit out by the sound every day after supper, reading, and one day I joined him there. It was a lovely June evening; the sound was full of sailboats, and the sky above us was as round and blue as a bowl.

  “I was reading a poem about a girl with beautiful yellow hair,” he said, “and then I look up and what do I see? A real girl with beautiful yellow hair.”

  For some reason I started to cry, not even caring what my other boarders thought as they sat up on the porch looking out over this landscape in which we figured.

  “Come here,” he said, and he took my hand and led me behind the old rose-covered boathouse, where he pulled me to him and kissed me curiously, as if it were an experiment.

  His name was Carl Redding Armistead. He had the reedy look of the poet, but all the assurance of the privileged class. I was older than he, but he was more experienced. He was well educated, and had been to Europe several times.

  “You pretty thing,” he said, and kissed me again. The scent of the roses was everywhere.

  I went that night to his room, and before the summer was out, we had lain together in nearly every room at the boardinghouse. We were crazy for each other by then, and I didn’t care what might happen, or who knew. On Saturday evenings I’d leave a cold supper for the rest, and Carl and I would take the skiff and row out to Sand Island, where the wild ponies were, and take off all our clothes and make love. Sometimes my back would be red and bleeding from the rough black sand and the broken shells on the beach.

  “Just a minute! Just a minute here!” Martha Louise is pounding on the table, and Frances Weinberg is crying, as usual. Sam Hofstetter is staring at me in a manner that indicates he has heard every word I’ve said.

  “Well, I think that’s terrific!” Shirley Lassiter giggles and bats her painted blue eyelids at us all.

  Of course this romance did not last. Nothing that intense can be sustained, although the loss of such intensity can scarcely be borne. Quite simply, Carl and I foundered upon the prospect of the future. He had to go on to that world which awaited him; I could not leave Mama. Our final parting was bitter—we were spent, exhausted by the force of what had passed between us. He did not even look back as he sped away in his red sports car, nor did I cry.

  Nor did I ever tell him about the existence of Carl, my son, whom I bore defiantly out of wedlock eight months later, telling no one who the father was. Oh, those were hard, black days! I was ostracized by the very people who had formerly praised me, and ogled by the men in the boardinghouse, who now considered me a fallen woman. I wore myself down to a frazzle taking care of Mama and the baby at the same time.

  One night, I was so tired I felt that I would actually die, yet little Carl would not stop crying. Nothing would quiet him—not rocking, not the breast, not walking the room. He had an unpleasant cry, like a cat mewing. I remember looking out my window at the quiet town, where everyone slept—everyone on this earth, I felt, except for me. I held Carl out at arm’s length and looked at him good in the streetlight, at his red, twisted little face. I had an awful urge to throw him out the window—

  “That’s enough!” several of them say at once. Martha Louise is standing.

  But it is Miss Elena who speaks. “I cannot believe,” she says severely, “that out of your entire life, Alice Scully, this is all you can find to write about. What of your long marriage to Mr. Scully? Your seven grandchildren? Those of us who have not been blessed with grandchildren would give—”

  Of course I loved Harold Scully. Of course I love my grandchildren. I love Solomon, too. I love them all. Miss Elena is like my sons, too terrified to admit to herself how many people we can love, how various we are. She does not want to hear it, any more than they do, any more than you do. You all want us to never change, never change.

  I did not throw my baby out the window, after all, and my mother finally died, and I sold the boardinghouse then and was able, at last, to go to school.

  Out of the corner of my eye I see Dr. Culbertson appear at the library door, accompanied by a man I do not know. Martha Louise says, “I simply cannot believe that a former English teacher—”

  This strikes me as very funny. My mind is filled with enormous sentences as I back up my chair and then start forward, out the other door and down the hall and outside into the sweet spring day, where the sunshine falls on my face as it did in those days on the beach, my whole body hot and aching and sticky with sweat and salt and blood, the wild ponies paying us no mind as they at
e the tall grass that grew at the edge of the dunes. Sometimes the ponies came so close that we could reach out and touch them. Their coats were shaggy and rough and full of burrs, I remember.

  Oh, I remember everything as I cruise forward on the sidewalk that neatly separates the rock garden from the golf course. I turn right at the corner, instead of left toward the Health Center. “Fore!” shouts Parker Howard, waving at me. A former English teacher, Martha Louise said. These sidewalks are like diagrams, parallel lines and dividers: oh, I could diagram anything. The semicolon, I used to say, is like a scale; it must separate items of equal rank, I’d warn them. Do not use a semicolon between a clause and a phrase, or between a main clause and a subordinate clause. Do not write, I loved Carl Redding Armistead; a rich man’s son. Do not write, If I had really loved Carl Armistead; I would have left with him despite all obstacles. Do not write, I still feel his touch; which has thrilled me throughout my life.

  I turn at the top of the hill and motor along the sidewalk toward the Residence Center, hoping to see Solomon. The sun is in my eyes. Do not carelessly link two sentences with only a comma. Do not write, I want to see Solomon again, he has meant so much to me. To correct this problem, subordinate one of the parts. I want to see Solomon, because he has meant so much to me. Because he has meant. So much. To me. Fragments. Fragments all. I push the button to open the door into the Residence Center, and sure enough, they’ve brought him out. They’ve dressed him in his madras plaid shirt and wheeled him in front of the television, which he hates. I cruise right over.

  “Solomon,” I say, but at first he doesn’t respond when he looks at me. I come even closer. “Solomon!” I say sharply, bumping his wheelchair. He notices me then, and a little light comes into his eyes.

  I cup my hands. “Solomon,” I say, “I’ll give you a kiss if you can guess what I’ve got in my hands.”

  He looks at me for a while longer.

  “Now Mrs. Scully,” his nurse starts.

  “Come on,” I say. “What have I got in here?”

  “An elephant,” Solomon finally says.

  “Close enough!” I cry, and lean right over to kiss his sweet old cheek, being unable to reach his mouth.

  “Mrs. Scully,” his nurse starts again, but I’m gone, I’m history, I’m out the front door and around the parking circle and up the long entrance drive to the highway. It all connects. Everything connects. The sun is bright, the dogwoods are blooming, the state flower of Virginia is the dogwood, I can still see the sun on the Chickahominy River and my own little sons as they sail their own little boats in a tidal pool by the Chesapeake Bay, they were all blond boys once, though their hair would darken later, Annapolis is the capital of Maryland, the first historic words ever transmitted by telegraph came to Maryland: “What hath God wrought?” The sun is still shining. It glares off the snow on Pikes Peak, it gleams through the milky blue glass of the old apothecary jar in the window of Harold Scully’s shop, it warms the asphalt on that road where Rose and I lie waiting, waiting, waiting.

  NEWS

  of the

  SPIRIT

  Johnny is having a party.

  Driving to the party with her fiancé, Drew, Paula still can’t believe it—as far as she knows, as far back as she can remember, Johnny has never had a party. In fact, her brother Johnny’s life has been the very opposite of party: a long awful jumble and slide of hospitals, group homes, rented rooms. And several periods of time when he was just not here, not anywhere, missing, and except for once when their dad flew out to Texas and got him out of jail, they never knew where he’d been. He’d show up again eventually, weeks or months later, grinning that grin, and you’d have to smile back at him no matter what. You couldn’t help it. Something inside you, some kind of a seawall that you had built and sandbagged against disaster, would start to seep and give and then collapse, but by then you were so glad to see Johnny that you didn’t care, not even when the water came up and swirled around your ankles. You were still smiling when you started to drown.

  Paula smiles now, even after everything, just to think of Johnny. She has not been thinking about him, on purpose, for almost three years. Maybe it’s time.

  Drew reaches across the gearshift of the new Volvo station wagon which he is so proud of, and grabs her hand. “What is it?” he says. “I wish you’d share that thought with me.”

  Paula stares at him. All her life she has hated people who say the word “share” out loud, she never in her wildest dreams imagined that she might end up with one of them, and certainly not that she could be so much in love with him, which she is. Drew squeezes her hand and smiles at her. His teeth are big and square, white and even, movie-star teeth. But they are real, like everything else about him. Drew is real. Paula has to keep pinching herself to believe it. Drew also has close-cropped, shiny brown hair and big brown eyes, dog eyes, much like the eyes of their Labrador puppy, Muddy Waters, in the very back of the station wagon behind his doggy gate.

  Drew and Paula take Muddy Waters everywhere they go. He is in the bonding phase, and they are bonding him for life. This is how their instructor at the obedience class put it, “bonding him for life”; it scares Paula to death. Because, okay, so they bond Muddy Waters to them for life, but what if they die? Or what if one of them dies? What if one of them is in a plane wreck and dies? What if one of them gets spinal meningitis and dies? “You mean, ‘What if this doesn’t work out,’ don’t you?” Drew said, right after the dog obedience class Tuesday night when Paula was freaking out in the parking lot. “Yes,” she said. “Yes, that’s what I mean,” and then she cried all the way back to the new house which Drew has bought for them because it was such a steal. Drew is always on the lookout for bargains. He likes to strike while the iron is hot, and maximize his opportunities.

  To Paula’s surprise, he seems to see Paula herself as an opportunity. Ever since they met when they were seated next to each other at a Leon Redbone concert, Drew has come on like gangbusters. That was six months ago. Already they have a house, they have a dog, they have a station wagon. They have a disposal in the kitchen, which dazzles Paula altogether. Sometimes when she’s in the house by herself, she’ll feed a whole head of lettuce into it just to watch it work. It’s almost soundless. It’s amazing. But Paula is amazed by everything these days, by Drew himself, by her gigantic good luck in having been selected by him from among all the women in the world. Just think, she almost didn’t go to the Leon Redbone concert, she almost stayed home with a book! Paula feels like a lady in a melodrama who has been saved in the nick of time, snatched back from the cliff in the pouring rain just before she would have slid off the edge and tumbled endlessly into the mist.

  But of course this idea is silly, this cliff stuff. Actually Paula was doing just fine before she met Drew; and before she met Drew, it never once occurred to her that she was on a cliff, or in the mist, or in any kind of peril. She can’t figure out why she feels so saved now. But she does, as she leans back smelling that new-car smell and holding Drew’s hand, lacing her fingers through his, while north Raleigh flows past her view in a river of burger stands and car washes and convenience stores.

  “I was just thinking about Johnny,” she says. “We used to have a lot of fun, too, we really did, before all the bad stuff.” Paula takes a deep breath. “We were real close,” she says.

  “I know you were,” Drew says. “I got that. Come here,” he says, and she leans over so he can kiss her. He nuzzles his face for a minute into her long curly hair.

  She giggles. “We’re just like teenagers,” she says.

  But they are not teenagers, she and Drew, not by a long shot. Paula has been a journalist, a petsitter, a waitress, a kindergarten teacher, lots of things, though she has never been married. Right now she’s a proofreader at a printing company. Drew sold real estate for ten years before he went to law school at Carolina. He had a whole other life, and another wife, who left him for her boss at a TV station. Drew’s first wife told him he was bor
ing, and Drew thinks maybe this was true, especially while he was in law school. Now that his practice is well established, he is trying to be less boring, by taking Chinese cooking classes, going to concerts, and jumping out of airplanes. Still, he can’t help being a very organized person. He just can’t help it. Drew finds Paula stimulating, he says, because of her varied interests, her checkered past. What he’s too nice to say is that she’s a flake, Paula thinks, but she is not, however, as flaky as Corinne, her mother. Maybe Corinne will come to Johnny’s party today, maybe Johnny has invited her. Maybe she will drive over from Rocky Mount with her new boyfriend.

  Paula cannot imagine what Drew will think of her mother, or of Johnny. Drew has never met anybody in Paula’s family except her father the barbecue king and her country-club sister, Elise. Elise thinks Drew is terrific.

  Paula has met every single person in Drew’s family, which is regular as rain. Drew’s parents have lived in the same house in Durham for twenty-five years. Drew’s father is a quality control engineer in a textile mill, whatever that means. His mother, nicknamed Boots, says she is a “home engineer.” This is her little joke. She has already given Paula some of their family’s favorite recipes, all of them involving canned tomato or mushroom soup. Looking at Drew’s family gathered around his parents’ dining room table last Easter, Paula wondered if the soup was it, the secret ingredient always missing from her own family. Drew’s father beamed, Drew’s grown-up sisters smiled, their husbands ate heartily, their children ran around shrieking like banshees, while Boots blossomed out alarmingly over her apron, a victim of her own good cooking.

  Back in the den, framed family photographs were clustered on every available surface like little armies. Weddings, Christmases, vacations. Prom pictures, school pictures, graduation pictures. This was where Drew got it, then, his habit of photographing everything, the only habit he’s got that Paula doesn’t like, although she hasn’t mustered the nerve yet to tell him to quit taking so many pictures, or at least to quit making her stand smack in the middle of every one. Once when she complained gently, Drew told her that the human figure adds perspective. She said, “What’s so great about perspective?” and Drew stared at her for a long minute before he hugged her. “You’re right,” he said. “You’re right.” But still he takes the pictures and then rushes off with them to One Hour Photo the minute they get home from the weekend. Before Paula has even unpacked her bag, Drew has put the pictures in an album, with captions. One of the captions, under a picture of Paula sticking her foot into the cold ocean on a February trip to Wrightsville Beach, says “Br-r-r-r!”