Guests on Earth: A Novel

by Lee Smith

  Mean, bossy, and universally despised Mrs. Aston Archer came out as Little Bo Peep wearing a long green silk dressing gown and a ruffled cap that, I knew, had been made in Art, from one of Mrs. Fitzgerald’s sketches. The idea that this pompous lady could be “little” anything was extremely amusing.

  But I was unaccountably upset by one of the nurses, pretty Miss White, who cradled a big glassy-eyed baby doll in her arms as she sang,

  Rockabye baby, in the treetop

  When the wind blows, the cradle will rock,

  When the bough breaks, the cradle will fall,

  And down will come baby, cradle and all.

  We all gasped when she dropped the baby, catching it just as it hit the floor. Perhaps it was because she wore her own real nursing uniform, but this performance was entirely too realistic for me, calling back certain nightmares from which I still suffered.

  Three young men wearing big mouse ears and whiskers and sunglasses—two patients, one staff—began running around the stage in circles while Mr. Axelrod, in his accustomed cowboy hat and kerchief, brandished an enormous knife. He shouted out “Three Blind Mice,” before chasing the others off the stage and right out through the crowd, overturning several chairs and creating a hubbub.

  The “garden” stirred restively, complaining. I didn’t blame them one bit, realizing how hard it must be to hold one position for so long. Virginia, in fact, sat up. But there were a few more performers—a black sheep, a baker—and then, finally, here came Robert, moving forward in somebody’s big flannel nightgown to generous applause, for he was a favorite of all, having actually lived at Highland Hospital for three years by then.

  Robert went out to center stage and froze, his huge white forehead glistening with sweat. Was he supposed to be Wee Willie Winkie? Or Diddle Diddle Dumpling, my son John? We were never to know. Robert took his glasses off and mopped his face with his sleeve, then put his glasses back on and grinned a big goofy grin at the assembly before shambling offstage, waving good-bye, to laughter and friendly cheers.

  Now only Mrs. Fitzgerald was left for the Finale, perfectly poised in a graceful attitude, utterly still. She seemed to swell up, growing larger before our very eyes as she waited for silence and attention. Alone among the participants, Mrs. Fitzgerald was clearly a real performer, every inch the prima ballerina in her flowing costume and her pink satin toe shoes, carrying a gauzy silver wand with streamers. A hush fell upon the hall.

  I begin to play softly, almost tentatively, as “Mary” wanders out into her garden—bending, peeping, searching for her flowers, then whirling across the front of the stage in a pique because she cannot find them. Now the music sounds vexed as well, glissandos and arpeggios, and “Mary” is contrary indeed, stamping, leaping, whirling, searching furiously everywhere, to no avail . . . I play more softly now. She stops, still as marble. She is not even out of breath, holding a ballet position to recite, “Mary, Mary, quite contrary, how does your garden grow?”

  I play a tinkly harp-chords introduction to the “Waltz of the Flowers” as she touches the “silver bells and cockleshells” one by one with her wand. They stretch and rise, then leap up to “bloom” vigorously. Finally the “pretty maids all in a row” jump up, too, executing their funny little jig step in perfect synchronicity. Now the music is happy and jubilant, the major chords of springtime in a floating melody over the three-four time, as Mrs. Fitzgerald leads her ensemble in a “flower dance” similar to the one that she performed herself as a young girl in Alabama, where she grew up.

  “Oh I was the prima ballerina of Montgomery,” she had told us. “I could have gone anywhere, and done anything. But then my husband saw me perform a solo at the Beauty Ball for officers during the war, and could not take his eyes off me, and that was that. He fell in love with me at first sight. So that was the end of it, or the beginning. He looked so handsome in his uniform. I was not yet eighteen. We danced all night and then walked out into the moonlight together, among the honeysuckle.” Her eyes had looked through us, past us, as she remembered.

  Now arranged in two lines upon the stage, her pretty maids sway in unison to and fro, to and fro, to and fro—one can easily imagine a springtime breeze wafting through this “garden.” They dissolve into groups of three to dance a charming step, my favorite, holding hands and prancing round like little children in a game. Led by Mrs. Fitzgerald, they form up into a line across the front of the stage again, twirling one by one and then all together before joining hands to sink to the floor in a graceful bow . . . somewhat ahead of my final chord, but I make do. They rise and bow again, now in delight and disarray, as the applause swells.

  Suddenly Mrs. Carroll appeared at the edge of the stage and gestured to me—me, Evalina!—and I came out from the piano to curtsy deeply, instinctively, though I had never done this before, and did not know that I could do it.

  Then we all melted into the crowd as a professional dance band took the stage. Chairs were cleared away. Couples began to foxtrot. We had been learning to dance, too, all those who would agree to participate—in exercise class, instead of basketball or volleyball. Most of us did not dance that evening, however; we sat in folding chairs and drank the red fruit punch and ate the usually forbidden cupcakes and looked at each other, and at the dancers.

  “EVALINA?” SOMEONE TOUCHED my bare back. I jumped a mile, but it was only Robert. I had been looking about for him in vain, but he had rushed off into the darkness after his appearance. Now he had taken off the nightgown, but he looked ridiculous anyhow, in some sort of black suit at least a size too small.

  “Do you want to dance?” He made a crazy little bow.

  “I don’t know how,” I said honestly, for I had been too timid to try it. “Do you know how?”

  “Oh, I had to take lessons,” he said.

  I kept forgetting about Robert’s privileged childhood.

  “Well . . .” I began.

  He held his elbow out at an angle and I grabbed on to it and stood up, then pitched forward to fall flat upon the floor. Somehow I had forgotten to take my new French heels off the rung on my folding chair. There was a nervous hush, then a titter, and finally a smatter of applause as I finally got up off the floor, my face burning.

  “Let’s go outside,” Robert said with utter tact, leading me out the diamond-paned door and onto the cold stone porch. Globe lamps made pools of light all down the sidewalk; partygoers were already leaving.

  “I didn’t know you could play the piano like that.” His voice came out of the dark.

  “I didn’t either,” I said. Actually I felt wonderful, glowing, every nerve on fire, in spite of—or maybe because of—my embarrassment. Out beyond the slope of the mountain, the whole dark sky was filled with stars, the Milky Way in a huge arch, the clearest I have ever seen it.

  Robert came up behind me in the dark and lifted my hair from my neck and put his lips there, a kiss that ran all the way down my body, creating a shimmering, lovely sensation that I have never forgotten in all these intervening years . . . if not passion, then the promise of passion: the salamander, twisting and shining in the sunlight.

  “Ev-a-lina! Ev-a-lina!” my chums burst out the door—Lily and Virginia and Melissa—and Robert stepped back. In fact, he disappeared, and it was over. The moment, my triumph . . . it was all over.

  IT WAS AS if we were in a turning kaleidoscope—everything changed. Everybody went back to being sad, or crazy, or got better and went home . . . Mrs. Fitzgerald to Montgomery for a visit, Lily to Mississippi, Robert to Cap d’Antibes where his mother was getting married for the fourth time.

  I made a new friend, Ella Jean Bascomb, one of the cooks’ daughters, who came to work with her mother when school was out. She surprised me one day by singing along when I was playing “Blue Moon” in the music room at Homewood. Ella Jean had a high, thin, pitch-perfect mountain voice, and she knew lots of songs. Soon she was seated on the piano bench beside me. She taught me all the sad verses of “Barbara Allen” and
other ballads they sang up in Madison County, north of Asheville, where she came from, and I began teaching her to play piano. In no time at all we could play a duet on “Heart and Soul,” belting the words out over and over, as loud as possible, until we collapsed in laughter. I taught her “Shenandoah,” which she sang beautifully, even Mrs. Carroll agreed, though she disapproved of this friendship because Ella Jean “did not come from a nice family,” by which Mrs. Carroll meant a family in town.

  And actually, Mrs. Carroll didn’t know the half of it.

  For Ella Jean was a tomboy through and through. She thought it was silly to hike, unable to imagine why anybody would want to just walk through these mountains she’d been walking in all her life. Instead, she taught me to swing on grapevines in the deep forest up above the hospital, climb the rocky cliffs (which she called “clifts”), find caves and old Indian graves, and strike fire from two rocks.

  “I’m part Cherokee,” she declared one time.

  “Which part?” I asked. “Your hiney?”

  She chased me through the trees. We built a fort and painted Indian signs on our arms and legs with pokeberry juice, then smoked rabbit tobacco she’d brought tied up in a rag from home. Unfortunately I got sick after this escapade, which caused Mrs. Hodges to declare Ella Jean “too rambunctious!” and limit our activities to the hospital grounds. Mrs. Hodges seemed relieved as, increasingly, Ella Jean had to stay home to take care of the younger children in her family.

  After several false starts, spring finally came to North Carolina. Along with the rest, I spent long hours in the gardens under the direction of old Gerhardt Otto, weeding around the perennials as they popped up in the beds near the buildings, clearing dead brush away everywhere, planting early lettuce in the covered beds at Brushwood, then seeds and tomato plants in the garden. I came to love the smell of the soil itself; my arms grew strong and brown.

  In June, a pool of scary red blood appeared without warning on my sheets, terrifying me. Nobody had ever told me that this would happen. Nurse White was dispatched to “show me the ropes,” as Mrs. Hodges put it, “the belt and pads and such.”

  I was out in the garden again, wearing this apparatus as I separated irises at the edge of the forest late one afternoon, when I heard laughter back in the trees. I stood up and peered into the woods to glimpse Miss Quinn, our PE instructor, and my beloved old art teacher Miss Malone actually kissing each other, of all things! Miss Malone’s back was turned to me; her long gray braid swung back and forth, back and forth, like the metronome on my piano. Across her shoulder, Miss Quinn winked at me—I’m sure she did—but she said nothing, and neither did I.

  Summer fled past, a beautiful summer. In June, Mrs. Carroll took me to Mrs. Grady’s Country Day School, all dressed up in a new dress with a sailor collar, for an interview. I played Debussy’s “Clair de Lune” on the piano for Mrs. Grady, who closed her eyes and swayed to the music. In July, my chums and I were taken out in boats on the French Broad River. Miss Quinn taught me to swim several different strokes in the Highland pool. Mrs. Hodges taught me to play bridge, which I was very good at. My period came and went again, twice more, my own bright blood, and I did not die. I learned a monologue, “To a Drunken Father,” though I had no father. Monologues were sweeping the country, said Phoebe Dean.

  In August, the staff and patients of Highland put on an outdoor performance of Midsummer Night’s Dream that starred Dr. Carroll himself, in puff sleeves and embarrassing white tights. Everyone got lost in the forest and then came out with someone else, holding hands, and then got married. By that time, I was coming to understand that there are all kinds of love. And there is no telling whom we may love, or when or why, or vice versa—for love is the greatest mystery of all. The Kiss in the Garden, I thought, smiling to imagine this book among my other Nancy Drews on their special shelf in my room, as I remembered Miss Quinn and Miss Malone’s long kiss. I pictured Mrs. Carroll and Dr. Carroll in a similar embrace, surrounded by yellow roses; Miss Ella on the train platform with her twinkly old boyfriend and his bouquet; Mr. and Mrs. Fitzgerald waltzing all night long in Alabama when they were young; and my own beautiful young mother, how she brightened when Arthur Graves appeared at our door, back when he loved us so. Robert’s face rose before me unbidden, like the sun.

  Finally, the good news came: I would attend Mrs. Grady’s Country Day School beginning in September. I would move into a room at Homewood, almost with the Carrolls! I counted the days, weeding the gardens and gathering tomatoes, ripe and warm from the sun.

  “NOW THEN, EVALINA, I’d say you are finally on your way!” Mrs. Hodges announced with no small satisfaction as she drove me over to Mrs. Grady’s on that first day of school. It was early September, a bright blue blowing day. Leaves skittered about our feet as we got out of the car. “Hold still, now.” She yanked my collar, gave my blouse an extra tuck, smoothed back my hair, and then surprised me with a brisk, firm kiss on the cheek. “Pretty as a picture you are,” she said. “There’ll be none finer, not to worry.”

  But I wasn’t worried, oddly enough. Nothing about school had ever alarmed me; I was good at school, placed a year ahead into ninth grade. I welcomed the regularity of Mrs. Grady’s, which was much calmer than our classes had been at Highland—no one ever burst into tears or fits or ran from the room crying or attacked anyone else. I loved the uniforms at Mrs. Grady’s, the bells and books and teams: everybody was on the Blue team or the Gold. I was to be a Gold. Now my time at Highland stood me in good stead, especially for athletics. Though I had never played some of these organized games, such as basketball or field hockey, I had grown strong walking up and down those hospital slopes, and I could run like the wind. I learned fast. The other girls had somehow gotten the idea that I was the Carrolls’ granddaughter, and I did nothing to enlighten them. Nor did Mrs. Grady herself, a formidable maiden lady who actually winked at me once when this came up. As a “new girl,” I was briefly the darling, courted by all. Everyone wanted to share her lunch with me, to be my partner in the relay races, to swing with me on the wicker swing in the arbor.

  It was a heady, sunny time for me, which somewhat offset my greatest disappointment: for Robert Liebnitz did not return to us. Mrs. Hodges and I sat side by side on the horsehair loveseat in the Carrolls’ apartment while Mrs. Carroll read his mother’s letter aloud to us. She wrote informing the Carrolls that her new husband, named Dr. Jerome Livingston, was an internationally acclaimed professor, a don of philosophy.

  “That’s rich!” snorted Mrs. Hodges. “He’ll need some philosophy, he will, dealing with the likes of that woman! She’ll run him ragged in no time, that she will. Mark my words.”

  Mrs. Carroll raised an elegant eyebrow at Mrs. Hodges, then continued. Apparently Dr. Livingston was also a famous educator who was very interested in Robert’s “case,” and had “taken him on.”

  “It’s about time, I’d say!” Mrs. Hodges seemed mollified. “Nothing wrong with the child, I always said. Just too smart, that’s all. Too in-tell-i-gent.” She made it sound like a curse, or an illness.

  Robert’s mother had bought a grand house for Dr. Livingston, a widower with several daughters of his own, in Cornwall, England. I was immediately jealous when I heard this news. Robert was already attending Oxford University under some sort of special dispensation arranged for him by his new stepfather. He was said to be “adjusting well” to all these arrangements. In fact, he was “in his element,” according to all.

  Mrs. Carroll put the fluttery avion letter down on the porcelain back of the elephant table next to her chair. “So we shall all miss him, yes?” She touched my hand.

  “I daresay,” answered Mrs. Hodges, while I nodded, unable to speak.

  “And yet, it is what we hope for above all things, Dr. Carroll and myself,” Mrs. Carroll continued quite seriously, leaning forward to cross her thin ankles. “That all our children shall be healed and strengthened, and go on to live successful real lives of their own, beyond our beloved
mountain.”

  I nodded and tried to smile, though tears were running down my face. I understood that her words were meant for me, too, that the kaleidoscope was taking yet another turn, and I had better adjust to this new pattern.

  Of course I continued my music lessons with Mrs. Carroll, sometimes along with several other town students, including a black girl named Eunice Kathleen Waymon who would later be known as Nina Simone. Mrs. Carroll had first heard her sing at a gospel service downtown. Now Mrs. Carroll was very interested in Eunice Waymon, more interested in her than she was in me, I felt. I was jealous of Eunice in the same way I had always been jealous of Mrs. Fitzgerald, who had sometimes been taken on trips with the Carrolls, once to Sarasota, Florida, for instance, where she studied art and they all went to the circus. I had been terribly upset about this; I would have given anything to see the circus! And now Mrs. Carroll was giving Eunice Waymon private singing lessons. Still, Eunice was very sweet to me and to everyone, and I was pleased to accompany her at the Carrolls’ afternoon soirees, when Eunice leaned up against the piano to sing “Night and Day” with all the assurance of a born performer. It was funny to see such a little girl with such a big voice, and to hear her sing those grown-up songs.

  “Pizzazz!” Mrs. Hodges crowed. “That girl has got it!” Everyone clapped and shouted “Bravo!” when we were done, and Mrs. Carroll gave us cupcakes and little cucumber sandwiches on white bread with the crusts cut off, and fruit punch in tiny green glasses from Italy.

  My old chums had dispersed over the summer, along with Robert. It was as if they had all walked into the forest as in “A Midsummer Night’s Dream.” Lily had stayed on in Mississippi, where she liked living with her Aunt Dee Dee in a big house brimming over with smaller cousins, four of them. I wrote to her, worried that she might be like Cinderella in this situation, but Lily wrote back saying no, there was plenty of help, and she was very excited because she was going to make her debut in two years’ time. Lily wrote to me on pink stationery with her name engraved on it in raised rose lettering.