Guests on Earth: A Novel

by Lee Smith

  The hours stood in the wings, panting hard, exhausted though proud of themselves.

  “We shall leave the stage bare for four full measures before the grand finale, which will be fun, I assure you! And you shall have earned it, you see? For this is art—no light without the darkness!”

  “So what’s the grand finale?” Ruth asked, her trademark sarcasm gone for once.

  Mrs. Fitzgerald stood tall and gave them her most radiant smile. “It is—the cancan!” she promised. “Next time! Now once more, back into those dark woods again, girls, before we leave . . .”

  I began to play the slow middle movement as they scattered obediently into their tentative search across the stage with Mrs. Fitzgerald watching them, nodding, pleased.

  “Hellfire! That ain’t dancing, that’s just running around. Anybody can do that, that’s got legs! I can dance better’n that with my eyes closed!” A piercing country voice cut into the ballet.

  Mrs. Fitzgerald walked forward to center stage and held up her hand like a traffic cop, stopping the dancers, and I ceased playing, too, which was a good thing as my hand had begun to itch furiously. “Who is that? Who is there?” Shielding her eyes with one hand, Mrs. Fitzgerald pointed imperiously past Dr. Schwartz and Phoebe Dean, sitting in the front row. They turned around in their seats to look up the center aisle, too.

  “No spectators, please. This is a closed rehearsal.” Mrs. Fitzgerald spoke firmly.

  “Well, I can dance, too.” The voice rang out in the dark auditorium. “I can dance better’n any of y’all. Ask anybody. And I have been on the stage, too, you might say, over in Knoxville, Tennessee, which none of these others has, I can tell you for a fact. Not a one of them. I’m the best dancer that ever was, and I’d be glad to help y’all out, iffen you was to ask me.”

  “Oh, thank you so much for volunteering,” Dr. Schwartz began quickly, “but actually—”

  “I ain’t asking you, ma’am. I’m asking her, that one up there on the stage,” came the voice.

  “Now, Flossie.” I stood up at my piano but could see only her yellow hair in the dim recesses of the auditorium. “Of course you’re a great dancer, but you must have misunderstood. This program is just for—”

  “You shut up! You just shut up, Miss Priss, I know all about you. All about you, don’t think I don’t—haven’t even got enough sense to get on the bus!”

  “That’s enough.” Mrs. Fitzgerald had come forward to the footlights now, hands on her hips, wearing her Cherokee face. She sounded very definite and even mean. “You—must—go—now!” She spaced out the words for emphasis. “Auditions are closed.”

  “They wasn’t no auditions. This ain’t nothing but a exercise for crazy people—”

  Karen Quinn moved forward to stand on one side of Mrs. Fitzgerald, with Jinx already on the other.

  But Mrs. Fitzgerald didn’t need any help. “Go now!” She looked terrifying, like one of her own paintings.

  “Bitch!” we heard, followed by the slamming, echoing door. Some of the hours giggled.

  “My goodness,” Mrs. Fitzgerald said mildly. “Now, girls, one more time—”

  I couldn’t believe they’d do it, but I started playing, and the hours started dancing again. Suddenly it was all over—both the unsettling incident and Mrs. Fitzgerald’s change in mood. She was pleasant and professional as she told them good-bye and let them go, chattering and excited, back into their own afternoons, Flossie’s outburst already forgotten.

  “This is not the first time I have wondered about that kitchen girl,” Dr. Schwartz told the rest of us, “though of course one rarely sees her . . . but there’s something, something . . .”

  “There’s something wrong with her,” Phoebe said flatly.

  “Perhaps I should speak to Dr. Bennett about her,” Dr Schwartz mused, putting on her coat.

  “Don’t,” I said, “She comes from a very poor family. I know she needs the job—”

  They both looked at me.

  “I knew her sister, Ella Jean, when I was here before.”

  “You are always surprising me, Evalina,” Dr. Schwartz said thoughtfully as we all left together.

  LATER, AS PHOEBE Dean and I entered the music room together, she remarked, “You know, I think I do remember the other one, the sister—isn’t she that girl who used to come in and play music with you?”

  “That’s her,” I said. “Ella Jean Bascomb. Their mother worked in the kitchen. Mrs. Carroll didn’t like for me to be friends with her.”

  Phoebe snorted. “I can just imagine!”

  Then she pointed at my piano, where a handful of purple and blue crocuses lay scattered across the keyboard.

  CHAPTER 14

  REHEARSALS WENT SMOOTHLY AFTER that, with no more interruptions from Flossie. But the kaleidoscope whirled toward Mardi Gras with dizzying speed. Now that I was playing New Orleans music for the gym classes, too, I was so busy that I could scarcely take in anything at the time; though in retrospect I vividly recall the morning I entered the greenhouse looking for Pan and found him working with Mrs. Fitzgerald on one of the long flats of seedlings that were already being prepared for spring.

  Together they bent over their task, marking the rows and dropping the tiny seeds, murmuring intently, heads so close that their hair touched, as if they were one. What were they saying? What could they possibly be saying to each other? Especially when Pan scarcely spoke to me. Though I felt that he loved me, in his way, it became clear to me in that moment that he loved these others, too—whoever he was with, I sometimes felt, whenever he was with them, with no more discrimination than one of his beloved animals—Mrs. Fitzgerald and Mrs. Morris and Flossie and who else? Who else? The terms were such that I could never know.

  Yet I didn’t care. I was beyond that. For when I was with Pan, I was happier than I had ever been in my life; I felt more myself in his lair than anyplace else on earth. I was at home there. I would take what I could get.

  And then there was the dinner when Ruth sat down next to me and began to whisper excitedly in my ear that Freddy had asked her to go shopping with him to help choose my engagement ring.

  “I don’t have an engagement ring,” I said stupidly, staring at Ruth’s bright red lipstick.

  “Well no, of course you don’t, you silly thing. He’s going to buy you one, stupid! At Carpenter-Matthews, I think. So my question for you is, whaddya want? A diamond, sure, but square-cut, emerald cut, round, or what?” She took a bite of meatloaf then waited, chewing industriously.

  “I—I don’t know.” I put my fork down.

  “Well, you better be thinking about it,” Ruth said seriously. “This is your big chance, honey. It’s now or never. You’d better speak up.” She took another bite.

  I stood abruptly, grabbing my tray of half-eaten food.

  “Look at her, she’s in shock,” Ruth said to Dixie.

  Dixie jumped up and gave me the biggest hug. “Get an emerald cut. That’s what I’ve got.” She flashed her beautiful diamond rings. “And you’d better choose me for your matron of honor,” she whispered. “Frank and I can drive back up for the wedding. Oh, Evalina, I just want you to be as happy as we are.” There was not a trace of irony in Dixie’s smiling face. With only a few shock treatments left to go, she looked so animated and beautiful again that Jinx had gotten jealous, trying to dance in front of her until Mrs. Fitzgerald caught on and sent Jinx back to her place.

  We rarely saw Jinx at Graystone during those days. Ever since Suzy Caldwell had stopped coming by (due to Dr. Bennett’s ever-tightening purse strings), there was not much communal activity in parlor or kitchen. This was fine by me, of course. I had my own secrets to keep. A long stem of pussy willow, almost in bloom, had appeared on my piano that week, and then a single yellow daffodil. And then, with only one week to go before Mardi Gras, it snowed again, a deep, soft, wet spring snow nipping both forsythia and redbud, canceling all activities, freezing us back in our snow globe where I was actually relieved to
be, where I didn’t have to deal with anything or anybody because there would never be any consequences outside our own closed world.

  DURING THE SECOND night of that last snowfall, I was awakened by police sirens shrieking past Graystone on their way up to the hospital grounds. One, two, three police cars . . . I lost count, running downstairs to join Ruth and Myra who already stood at the parlor windows, clutching their robes around them. I had wrapped myself up in one of Mrs. Hodges’s afghans.

  “What on earth . . .” Myra trailed off, biting her lip .

  “I can’t even imagine,” Ruth said. “But obviously it’s something really awful.”

  “Don’t you think we ought to go up there and find out?” I wanted to.

  “No, no, absolutely not!” Ruth was always so bossy. “Whatever it is, we’d just be in the way. Besides, we’ll find out soon enough anyway, and frankly, I’m sure it’s something we’d rather not know.”

  “Mama always said, ‘Don’t borrow trouble,’ ” quavered Myra, who was much better now but still got easily upset.

  “Wait a minute! I thought your damn mother died,” Ruth said.

  “She did, you mean thing!” Now Myra burst into loud, choking sobs, so I hugged her, as somebody clearly had to. I could feel her fragile shoulder bones like stunted wings beneath her robe. I thought of Mrs. Fitzgerald, who had lived with her mother for so much of her life. And of my own mother, dead so long, too young.

  Just then there came a pounding at the door.

  “Don’t open it.” Myra grabbed at Ruth’s robe.

  “Now honey, don’t be silly.” Ruth slid the safety latch and threw the door open and there stood Mr. Pugh, incongruous in a red knit cap that could have belonged to some large child, swinging his arms and stamping his feet on the mat. Snow fell off him in clumps. Even his glasses were wet.

  “Can I come in, girls?”

  We stood back.

  “I’ve come to tell you what’s going on. We thought that all this excitement might have awakened you.”

  “I’ll say!” Ruth exclaimed. “So what’s happening, Sir?”

  The old teacher took off his knit gloves and held them in his red hands. “It’s already happened, apparently. It’s all over.”

  “What?” We breathed as one.

  He hesitated for a moment, then said, “It seems that Charles Winston died earlier tonight at a hotel in downtown Asheville, the Haywood Park, where he had rented a room.”

  “Doesn’t he have a room at the hospital?” Ruth asked.

  “Of course. But apparently he had gone down there and rented this hotel room under an assumed name, so it took them a little while to find his wallet and figure out who he really was. The police had already notified his family about his death before we even knew, unfortunately.” Mr. Pugh shook his head.

  “Charles Winston is dead?” I heard myself ask. I thought of his nice smile and his worried gray eyes with that vertical line between them, as if he were always squinting into distance.

  Mr. Pugh nodded, his glasses glistening in the yellow light from our potbellied Victorian lamp.

  “But how?” Ruth asked.

  “Gunshot wound to the head,” Mr. Pugh answered, as we all drew closer, “which made it very difficult to identify him. Suicide, obviously, though there was no note. The police are here right now, going through his belongings. That’s what all the fuss is about, all these unnecessary sirens alarming everybody. You may not realize it, but this is—was—a young man from a very prominent family, perhaps the most important in North Carolina. He was an only child. So this is a terrible tragedy, girls, of course, but it happens. It happens not infrequently, the lingering trauma of war.” Mr. Pugh looked somber. “In any case, there’s nothing for you to be scared of here. Nothing at all. Don’t wake up the others, and go back to sleep yourselves, if you can. There’ll be a convocation at ten o’clock in the morning at Homewood. Any more questions now?”

  We all shook our heads, and I stepped over to hug him, the sweetest and best old man.

  “You’ll be okay, Evalina,” he said. “All of you will be just fine. Good night, see you in the morning.”

  Arm in arm, Ruth and Myra went back upstairs. Their doors shut one by one. I turned off the downstairs lights, then followed them, sitting on the top step until all noise from their rooms had ceased and I could hear Myra’s stuffy breathing grow regular.

  I had never felt more awake in my life.

  First I tiptoed over to open Amanda’s door. In the streetlight coming through the window, I could see her long blonde hair spilling across her pillow. She sighed and turned in sleep. I closed the door.

  Then I opened the door next to mine. “Jinx?” I whispered urgently, knowing I would wake her immediately as she was such a light sleeper—“Just a cat napper,” she always said—a habit formed in those scary places where she had lived.

  “Jinx?” again.

  Nothing.

  “Jinx.”

  Nothing.

  Finally I reached for the switch by the door and snapped on the overhead light.

  Her bed was tightly made, with hospital corners and not one wrinkle, the way she had learned to do it at the reformatory. In fact, her room looked so neat that it might easily have been unoccupied. Even the top of the dresser was bare except for a red plastic comb. Had she run away? No, I decided, opening the dresser drawers one by one to find her few clothes, which were pitiful, actually, especially the gray and threadbare underthings. It was hard to imagine the vital, colorful Jinx clad in such as these. She always made such a vivid impression that I guess I’d never noticed what she wore. The bottom drawer contained several old sweaters and a pair of thick wool socks with a man’s gold watch stuck in one toe.

  What if Jinx came in and found me looking through her things? She’d probably kill me. I didn’t care, though. For I was becoming more and more agitated, with a growing sense that I was searching for something, like the “hours” in the dance. I opened the mirrored medicine chest over the sink, which contained a bottle of Jergens lotion, a bottle of aspirin, toothpaste and toothbrush, a fancy enamel pillbox filled with pills (whose?), and some shampoo I’d been missing. I left it there. Quickly, I went through the few clothes hanging in her closet.

  Then on impulse I dropped down to my knees to look under the bed, where I found two of Pan’s hand-carved animals. The bear stood up on its hind legs, twelve inches tall, so beautifully detailed that you could see its individual teeth and even its hair; it must have taken him days to carve the hair, and I could imagine him doing it, night after night by the oil lamp and the fire. And there was a little fox in an attitude of listening, with lifted head, pointed nose, and a long, bushy tail that curled just so. Remembering the elephant that I had painstakingly crafted for Pan’s collection, clumsy and comic with its big head, I was suddenly, deeply furious.

  Shakily I got to my feet, replacing everything just so before I went back to my own room and dressed, putting on my warmest socks and my boots, my jacket and gloves and scarf, wrapping it around my head until it half covered my face. When I opened the kitchen door, I was relieved to see that the low gray sky was clearing at last; patchy clouds raced across it so that occasionally the half-moon shone out on the snow. There was a lot of activity at the hospital—red lights, blue lights, car lights, and voices—as I started up the hill, staying off the sidewalk, keeping to the shrubbery and bushes. The heavy, wet snow clung to my boots and slowed me down. I looked both ways and waited carefully before making my way across the road as quickly as I could. Finally I reached the old well, our landmark. I headed downhill straight for the forest just as the clouds cleared and the moon popped out revealing a stretch of snow as shining and open as it had been the very first time I ever went there.

  My feet lightened as I ran across it to the trees. But where was the opening, the forest door? I ran down the tree line, then doubled back. Nowhere could I find it, nowhere could I see the entrance, the path. I started crying. Soon I was exhau
sted, running back and forth along the tree line, at the same time terrified that someone would see me. Finally I just beat my way through the brush and into the deeper woods at random. Surely, I thought, I will find the path now, the path will appear any minute, yet it did not. I recognized nothing. I could not even find that huge outcropping of rock. Instead I tumbled down an embankment and became ensnared in laurel branches like grasping hands. Twice I tripped and fell. The tears froze on my face. The third time I just lay there in the snow for a while to rest, listening to the crackle of ice and the creaking of the trees and the rustling sounds of the night forest all around me and getting very sleepy, though I remembered that this is how people freeze to death. It is easy and lovely and pleasant, like sleep—the most pleasant way to commit suicide. But I was not Charles Winston. I had nearly lost my life already, and now I wanted it. I wanted it all—that brass ring, the whole ball of wax. The world. I struggled desperately to get up on my elbows, then managed to sit further up and hug my knees beneath my wet pants. The sky shone lighter now through the lacy black trees. Morgen, I remembered. Morgen.

  Luckily, getting out of the forest proved easier than getting in. Not a soul was stirring as I entered Graystone in the pale dawn light. I turned Jinx’s knob as soon as I got upstairs, and there she was, sleeping soundly and innocently facedown and spread-eagled in her own bed like a child—or like a snow angel, I thought, remembering the game we had all played in the snow at Christmas time, which now seemed like eons ago.