Guests on Earth: A Novel

by Lee Smith

  “I know who you are, too.” He smiled a long slow smile at her. “You’re the lucky one, aren’t you?”

  “Am I?” She thought about this.

  “Want to walk down and see the water?”

  “Sure,” Dixie said, suddenly wanting to do this more than anything, leaving the path to follow Duncan down to the glittery, slapping water filled with stars. She ran forward to stand at the edge of it and he stood just behind her.

  “ ‘The sea is calm tonight, the tide is full, the moon lies fair upon the straits; on the French coast the light gleams and is gone,’ ” he recited.

  “ ‘The cliffs of England stand, glimmering and vast, out in the tranquil bay. Come to the window, sweet is the night air!’ ” Dixie finished the verse, and then he put his arms around her and squeezed her tight, and then he turned her around and kissed her full on the lips, not a groping, sloppy kiss such as she allowed her beaux, but a solid, real kiss. She opened her mouth to him.

  “Come on,” he said, taking her hand and walking her along the edge of the beach to the old boathouse, where a beautiful wooden motorboat named Miss Dolly’s Folly rocked in its slip and the upstairs loft contained only a mattress pulled right up to the huge triangular window propped wide open, looking out over the harbor. Duncan drew her down upon it.

  “You like English poetry, then,” he said to her, and Dixie said, “Oh yes,” telling him her favorites, “Ode on a Grecian Urn” and “La Belle Dame Sans Merci.” She went on and on, she just couldn’t believe herself. He nodded gravely, fiddling with the spaghetti straps on her shoulders. He had majored in English literature himself; in fact he would be leaving for England in a few days, headed for the Lake District and then for Oxford, where he would study for the next two years, soon to be joined by a woman from Boston, his lover. His family didn’t know this part. “And you’re going where, to school?” he asked.

  “Agnes Scott,” she said, “but not right now. I’ve put it off a year.”

  “Don’t do that. Don’t put it off.” He turned her around to face him. “You’re not like these others.” He took the camellia out of her hair, carefully, then laid her back against the mattress where she forgot in an instant everything her mother had always told her about leading them on, then making them stop—always making them stop—and hanging on to your most precious possession. Suddenly she didn’t care about that anymore, and she was not sorry then, or later when they watched the moon set, dropping down like a glowing opal into the water, the most beautiful thing Dixie had ever seen, or at least noticed.

  At one point he drew back a bit, to look into her face. “You are protected, of course,” he said.

  “Of course,” she said, not having a clue what he meant.

  IT WAS HER sister Estelle who broke the news, coming into the bathroom to stand silently while Dixie, on her knees, retched into the toilet, not even caring that her long dark hair trailed down into the horrible water.

  “Oh my God,” Estelle said flatly. “Oh my God.” Then, “You’re pregnant, Mary Margaret, I’m going to tell Mama!” almost crowing as she ran off, her bare feet slapping down the hall.

  “Mary Margaret Stovall, I just can’t believe you would do this to me!” Dixie’s mother dragged her head up out of the toilet and slapped her face, laying her flat out on the bathroom floor, sobbing.

  “What?” Dixie remembers asking. “Do what to you?”

  “This baby!” her mother shrieked. “You cannot have this baby!”

  A Lysol douche followed, right there on the bathroom floor, with Estelle holding her down. When that didn’t seem to work, Daisy Belle pushed her into the car for a trip out into the county to visit an old black woman who poked and prodded and then patted Dixie on the head and said, “Yes, girl. You go on home and have this child and love it to pieces. That’s all you can do, that’s what I’m telling you. This child gone be a blessing in the world.” Whereupon Daisy Belle started to shriek again. The scar stood out white in her red face. “Drunk!” she screamed. “Whore!” Dixie had to drive back home, with Estelle giggling in the backseat.

  Dixie wouldn’t tell them, then or later, not ever, who the father was. She could not say why exactly, except that seemed to be the one thing she might keep out of this whole experience, the secret of the father, and the sound of the little waves, and the moonset over the water.

  So instead of Agnes Scott, she went to the Florence Crittendon Home outside Columbus. Her parents made her duck down in the backseat as they drove out of town, and no one said a word. They smoked cigarettes on the long ride, all three of them. It was nearly dark by the time they turned down a long unmarked drive that led to a tall Gothic building with heavy pointed doors, like church doors.

  One of the matrons opened the door. She was large, mannish, and grave. It all happened very fast. Her father handed the matron an envelope, and the matron shook hands with him. Dixie’s father kissed her on the cheek, while her mother sobbed into a handkerchief. Then they were gone. The matron pointed down at Dixie’s small suitcase, and Dixie picked it up.

  “Come on, then,” the matron said.

  “I don’t want to stay here,” Dixie said.

  “You should have thought of that earlier then, shouldn’t you, dear? Instead of opening up your legs to any Tom, Dick, or Harry who came around. But at least you have made the right choice now, at least you will be giving your baby to good people, decent people who want it, who will love it and take care of it since there is no way you could ever provide for it yourself,” the matron said in a voice that was neither mean nor nice. “Too late now,” the matron said.

  Dixie followed her up two flights of stairs, dark woodwork everywhere, to the third floor dormitory where the girls slept four to a room. Finally they stopped before room number 303; through the cracked door, Dixie could see three girls moving about within.

  The matron put a restraining hand on Dixie’s arm. “Wait. Pick a name for yourself,” she said.

  “What?” Surely Dixie had heard wrong.

  “A name. Everyone assumes another name here. You’ll be glad about this later. No one will ever know who you were—it will be as though this dark chapter never happened in your life. You may choose your new name now.”

  “Annabelle Lee,” Dixie said immediately.

  “Oh. Ha, ha. A little joke, I see. We shall go with Anna, then,” the matron said, pushing the door open to clap her hands and announce, “Girls! This is your new roommate, Anna.” They gave Dixie a cautious greeting, then a real welcome when the matron had left, closing the door behind her.

  All the girls had to do chores, such as washing dishes, cleaning, and helping in the kitchen, Dixie’s permanent job as soon as they realized she knew how to cook. “Biscuits,” she said. “They all loved my biscuits, I had to get up at the crack of dawn to make them.”

  “Wasn’t that hard?” I asked. “Didn’t you mind?”

  “No.” She shook her dark curls. “I didn’t care. I was just so glad to be away from home, away from Mama and Estelle. I didn’t want to be Mary Margaret anymore. And I was sick of being Dixie, too—I didn’t even realize that until I left.”

  So Dixie liked being Anna, who was nobody, measuring out the flour and the buttermilk in that great big shadowy kitchen at dawn. She taught the other girls to fox-trot and waltz, all of them laughing at how hard this was because of their big stomachs, and helped them with their schoolwork, for she was far beyond them all. Some could scarcely read, and these became Dixie’s special challenge. To her surprise, she liked being pregnant, too, feeling her stomach stretch and pull, feeling the swell of her breasts.

  “The first time he kicked, I got so excited I almost died,” she told me. “I used to lie awake with my hands on my stomach so I could feel him moving around in there, which filled me with the strangest, strongest feeling. It was like a deep, deep joy. The baby still didn’t seem exactly real to me, but he made me feel real.”

  When Dixie’s water broke (in the kitchen of the Flor
ence Crittendon Home, while she was making biscuits) they rushed her to the hospital and then shaved her and gave her an enema, which was a horrible shock. Nobody had told her anything about having the baby, what it would be like. By then the pain was so bad, she asked the nurse for something to take, but while the nurse was gone the baby started coming, and then they were wheeling her out of that little room. into the delivery room with its big blinding lights in her eyes. When Dixie woke up, she had already had the baby, a boy they said, and he was already gone.

  A social worker came in and said, “Here, sign this paper. It’s your choice—do you want to see your baby or not? We advise against it.” Dixie said no and signed the paper giving him up to his adoptive parents, giving up all rights. And the social worker said, ”Good. That’s the best. Your parents will be coming for you in a few days.”

  But then Dixie cheated. In the middle of the night, she walked out to the baby room and saw him. A young nurse was giving him a bottle, right in front of the window. Then an old nurse noticed Dixie, and went into the baby room and whispered something to the young nurse, who looked up and then on some impulse held the baby straight out to Dixie, right on the other side of the glass, so that she could see him up close, his long head, his funny squashed nose, and dark fuzzy hair. Then the old nurse grabbed the baby up and whisked him away to the back of the baby room where he turned red and started crying and then Dixie couldn’t see him anymore.

  When Dixie’s parents came for her, she started telling them what the baby had looked like, but her mother said, “Hush. You never had a baby. That never happened. You went off to college, but then you got tuberculosis, and so you have been staying with your aunt Julia, in Thomasville, to recuperate. In fact you are still recuperating. We are going there now.”

  Dixie had never met her father’s younger sister, since Daisy Belle had always refused to have anything to do with his family. Julia, a plump, blowsy blonde, handed Dixie a glass of whisky the minute her parents left. “Well, you’ve been through hell, haven’t you, honey?” she said. “I know all about it, believe me. You can stay here as long as you need to. First thing you’d better do is lie down.”

  When Dixie began to feel better, she didn’t want to go back home. So Julia got her a job at the candy counter up at the front of the dime store where Julia herself worked in the office; she had been the proprietor’s mistress for twelve years. Here Dixie thrived, talking to everybody who came in the store, especially the boys from the nearby military academy who came in droves to buy her candied orange slices and nonpareils. Soon she was out every night with one or another, “dancing up a storm, and drinking . . . Lord! Seems like I was drunk half the time. I didn’t care. I didn’t care what I did, I didn’t care about anything. And Julia didn’t care, either. She was a drinker herself. Her Mr. Gordy was sneaking in and out all the time, Ernie Gordy, I got used to him. Hell, I liked him! Mr. Gordy was real nice.”

  Some of the cadets were nice boys, and some were not nice boys, and one of these had tried to do something bad to her one night and she had jumped out of his car in a clearing in the woods and he had roared off, furious, and that’s when she met Frank Calhoun, who came along and stopped his car and was such a gentleman. He never even asked her what she was doing out there barefooted on that road in the middle of the night, wearing a party dress. A light rain had just begun to fall. He got out of the car and took off his seersucker jacket and put it around her shoulders before settling her into the passenger seat and asking her where she needed to go.

  Frank Calhoun had been a soldier himself, it turned out, stationed in San Francisco, but then his father had died suddenly of a heart attack and he had been released from the navy and sent back home to run the farm. “And I’m still here,” he said, smiling at Dixie, who was desperately trying to sober up enough to take all this in. She liked what she could see of him, the big square pleasant face in the dashboard lights. “Where is the farm?” she asked, and he said, “Here. Right outside of town here,” and when she asked, “Is it a big farm?” he just grinned at her. “Yep,” he said. He drove her back to Julia’s, then got out and went around the car to open the door and hold an umbrella for her in the rain, which was pouring down like crazy by then, but this didn’t matter because Dixie was a mess anyway, and all of a sudden she was crying so hard she couldn’t see. Frank Calhoun was the perfect gentleman, escorting her up on the porch to the front door.

  “Are you going to be all right now, Missy?” He lifted her chin to look into her eyes in the porch light.

  She swallowed, tasting gin. “Yes. But nobody has ever been so nice to me.”

  He grinned, touching the tip of her nose. “You ain’t seen nothing yet.”

  Which turned out to be completely true. Frank Calhoun was the nicest young man in the world, capable and calm, running El Destino, his family’s plantation, which covered 400 acres and contained his embittered mother, who became furious when Frank dropped his childhood sweetheart, Raynelle, on the spot and married Dixie who came from trash whether she had actually made her debut at the Gone with the Wind Ball or not. Big Mama Calhoun turned out to be the only person in the world who didn’t like Dixie on sight, and she never liked her, not even in the early years when Dixie was trying so hard and learned to ride the horses that Frank loved and joined the Junior Woman’s Club and served on committees and gave big parties and had such a hard time with her first pregnancy, toxemia, that she had to be on bed rest the last three months. Dixie felt like an impostor in this life, and she always felt like Big Mama knew that she was an impostor.

  But nobody knew her secret except Frank, who loved her to distraction anyway, and always called her “Missy,” and adored the little girls, too, riding first Margaret and then Lissa everywhere on his horse with him. Soon they both had little ponies of their own. Dixie had all the household help in the world. But none of that mattered. And somehow, having children of her own didn’t matter, either. Somehow, that made it worse. Dixie knew what she had done, and she knew that she didn’t deserve Frank, or her beautiful daughters, or her wonderful life. She was not worthy of any of it. She suffered from migraine headaches, colitis, and neuralgia. She stopped riding, she stopped seeing friends.

  And then came the day when she just couldn’t get out of bed.

  CHAPTER 9

  THE FIRST DAY OF November dawned unseasonably warm and sunny. Somehow, the moment I woke up, I remembered to say “Rabbit, Rabbit” out loud, a superstitious practice taught to me by Mrs. Hodges years before, these words to be spoken first thing in the morning on the first day of each month to ensure good luck for all the days of the month ahead. And I even felt lucky as I skipped out after three sessions of playing piano for Phoebe Dean’s groups and ran down the hill toward the greenhouse, looking for Pan.

  “Where is he?” I asked, finding Mrs. Morris doing her crossword in a wicker chair she’d dragged out into the sunshine.

  She looked up to smile at me. “Listen,” she said. “You can hear him.”

  I followed her gaze up the hill toward the Central Building, then followed the music to the wide-open kitchen door, where a group of apron-clad workers had spilled out onto the lawn, some on wooden chairs and stools, some kneeling or seated on the cold, wiry grass. Most were singing along. Pan’s harmonica wailed out above the voices. And there he sat, knee to knee with a blonde girl who was playing a small, handmade, and very old guitar. I could not see her face for the fall of her white-gold hair, but her high voice vaulted and arced over all the rest, sending a sudden chill to my heart, for I knew that voice somehow, as I knew the song, which I had learned from Ella Jean Bascomb years before. I drew closer and began to sing along.

  Pan was playing the harmonica furiously and stomping his right foot on the ground, the way he always did. When he looked up and saw me, his eyes lit up and a big grin crept around the edge of his “harp.” He nodded then threw his head back in a gesture of welcome, and my own heart soared with the music. Others greeted me as well. “H
ey, little Liza, little Liza Jane,” we sang. I sat down on the grass. From this perspective, I could see the girl guitar player’s face, and then it came to me. She was Flossie, Ella Jean’s sister who had gone off to Knoxville in the car with that horrible man, the one who had tried to kiss me in the dark woods. Flossie! She looked almost exactly like her mother now, though she was paler and even more beautiful.

  When they were done with “Liza Jane,” they did not stop but picked up the pace as they moved into “Orange Blossom Special,” leaning in toward each other until their heads touched, his shaggy dark hair and her wild light curls that caught all the sunshine, as they played faster and faster, playing up a storm. For a moment on that bright sunny day everyone else fell absolutely silent; we knew we were hearing something rare, something wonderful. It was a moment caught in time and space that would not come again. Oddly it reminded me of my own senior recital accompanying Lillian Field at Peabody, years before. Then Pan went into a big long train whistle, going away, going down the track, around a curve and then another curve, and she kept up with him, all the way down the mountain. “Oh Lord!” Flossie hollered as she hit the last lick. “Woo woo!” Pan yelled as he jumped to his feet, harmonica still in one outstretched hand.

  It was over. They were dispersing, headed back to work, when Mrs. Morris called from the edge of the group: “Pan, I hate to break this up, honey, but Cal needs you to go down to the station with him right now to pick up a shipment.”

  Pan touched my shoulder—just once, lightly, as he took off down the hill.

  I got up and went to sit on his empty chair next to Flossie. She had appeared possessed, playing, but now she looked drained, slumped back in her chair as if exhausted, every bit of color bleached out of her by the bright winter sun. For a minute I wondered if she might be albino, or part albino, if such a thing were possible; yet I remembered how fair her beautiful mother was. Flossie sat gazing out at nothing, with no expression at all on her perfect paper-white face.