“Everybody does around here, what’s married. Ain’t nobody around here got nothing to hide.”
“Now, he’s full of it,” said the man called Vern. “This rascal’s been married for nigh onto forty years. You see any ring on his tough hide?”
Emma looked down at the man’s hands, which looked like the roots of an upended tree. They bore a lot of dirt but no gold. “Tell you what, boys, we ought to stop wasting this nice lady’s time. You want to know anything about Meadville, you ought to see Miss Carrie.”
“Who’s she?”
“Miss Carrie?” All three of the men laughed. Among them they probably had a complete set of teeth. “Miss Carrie is a retired schoolteacher, sits in the library afternoons now, runs out and grabs children when they go past, tries to force them to take books.”
“She ever succeed?” Emma asked.
“Yep. I reckon she does about eight or nine times out of ten. She’s fast, Miss Carrie. And hard to argue with, once she’s got her mind made up.”
“Where would I find her?”
Vern squinted up at the sun. He didn’t wear a watch.
“Well, you could wait until the library opens at one, or you could go on over to her house.”
“I couldn’t do that,” Emma said.
“Why not?”
“Well, wouldn’t that be rude?”
But if she didn’t, what was she going to do until then? There didn’t seem to be much happening in Meadville other than sitting out in front of the Piggly Wiggly.
“Maybe I could call her on the phone?”
“Now, why on earth would you want to? She ain’t going to know you no better when you go on over there after you’ve wasted a dime. If I was you, I’d just walk down there,” the man gestured down a tree-lined street, the broad-porched houses spaced far apart, “and knock on her front door.”
* * *
“Lord have mercy, child. There’s nothing I like better than some company. And I don’t get much of it around here.”
Emma had already introduced herself and her mission at the door, but before she was half finished, the tall thin still-pretty old woman with the snowy cloud of hair piled atop her head had taken her arm and pulled her inside. Her grasp was strong. Emma could see what the men might have meant about Miss Carrie’s will being difficult to resist. Had she plopped a book into Emma’s hands, Emma would have sat right down and read it.
“Can I get you a glass of iced tea?”
“No, ma’am, that’s—”
“Don’t stand on ceremony, child. If you’ve just come in from the road, you need something to drink.” Miss Carrie was already halfway into the kitchen. Behind her she left the faint scent of lemon verbena.
The living room was filled with a mix of Grand Rapids veneer and Victorian antiques. From her vantage point on a red satin loveseat Emma looked at an inlaid rosewood grandfather clock ticking away in one corner, swinging its brass pendulum. Heavy cream-colored curtains filtered the sun. But the most outstanding feature of the living room was its astounding assemblage of books. They lined the room floor to ceiling in oak bookcases, all of them chockful.
“I see you noticed my books,” Miss Carrie said. She carried a silver tray with a green pressed-glass pitcher, two tall glasses and a china sugar bowl.
“I just can’t stand it when people sweeten my tea, can you?” Miss Carrie said. “Just assuming that you like it that way. I think a body ought to have a choice.”
Emma agreed.
“Well, anyway, these are my friends.” The old woman gestured at the thousands of volumes around the room. “They were all strangers, like you, when they first came to call. But now I know them by first name, just like I’ve known all the people of Meadville. Taught them first grade for three generations.”
“Three? Goodness, Miss Carrie, I teach in a junior college, but I can’t imagine doing it that long. I’m already trying to get out.”
“Well, it’s different with you younger folks. You pull up stakes and move on. But back in my time if you grew up a maiden lady like I am, well, you did the best you could, and mostly that meant staying put.”
“You never wanted to go away from here?”
“Why, where would I go? This is where I grew up.”
“You never wanted to see anything else?”
“Oh, child, I don’t mean I never left. I went to London and Paris and Rome, Venice and Vienna.”
Emma’s eyes registered surprise.
“Yes. I did. In 1909, my sister and I and two aunts did a grand tour.”
“In 1909?”
“Why, yes. I was born in 1889. That makes me eighty-five this past spring; I’ll save you the trouble of subtracting. Anyway, it was a wonderful trip, but I’d seen it then, don’t you know, so I was content to come back home.”
“And you never married? But you’re still such a lovely woman. I can’t imagine.” Oh yes you can, Emma. You mean you just can’t imagine it in her time.
“Even in those days, it took more than being lovely, thank you, to make it work. I always found that a married woman had to have a certain kind of malleability, a disposition to bend to the will of a man, and I just never had that.” Miss Carrie finished her little speech with a lifted chin and pressed lips, as if it was something she’d long ago decided and had repeated many times in the decades since.
“Maybe not all men.” Name three exceptions, Emma. Two. Try one.
“No, not all of them. But most of them are like that, too many to make it likely for a headstrong woman like myself to marry.”
“Was there never anyone?”
Emma thought then perhaps she shouldn’t be so nosy, but Miss Carrie didn’t seem to mind.
“Yes, there was one perfectly wonderful man from Asheville.” She waved one hand toward her front door. “Up in North Carolina, about fifty miles north. He was from one of the town’s first families, and I met him when I was summering with my Aunt Penelope in the summer of 1913. It’s cooler up there, you know. Anyway, I met Malcolm that summer, and he courted me all the next year. It was a scandal, what with all those pretty girls in Asheville waiting for Malcolm to decide to settle down, and I was already an old maid of twenty-three, from this little one-horse town no one had ever heard of. But Malcolm didn’t care. He rode over all those miles to call on me. ‘I like a woman,’ he said, ‘who has some spunk, who has a mind and knows it.’”
Miss Carrie smiled then and Emma could see the young woman inside her, her cheeks rosy with color. Some spunk, wasn’t that what Jesse had loved about her too, until he’d figured out that part of that equation meant that deep down inside she didn’t really need him? That she didn’t full-time need anyone. No one, Emma? Then why are you here in the godforsaken north-Georgia hills looking for the momma you’ve never known?
“What happened to him?”
“He died in the war, the first war. I never met another man who felt the way he did.”
They were quiet for a moment. Emma listened to the grandfather clock ticking.
“Now.” Miss Carrie sat up straight, with both her blue-veined hands flat on her lap, shell-pink nails pointing straight toward Emma. “That’s enough about me. Tell me again whom you’ve come seeking.”
Emma reached into her bag and pulled out the photocopy of her mother’s death certificate.
Miss Carrie peered at it closely through her rimless glasses.
“Yes, it does say Meadville. And it does say 1906. Let’s see.” She figured quickly in her head. “I was seventeen then. I’d just finished my second year of normal school. But I don’t remember this name.”
“Do you really think you’d remember?”
“If they were here any time at all. This is just a village, Emma. There’s not much that can slip by. Unless…” She paused and rested her head on her hand as if she were remembering.
“Yes?” Emma tried to keep the hope out of her voice.
“Unless they were just passing through. Could your grandfather have
been an itinerant? A traveler? Maybe a circuit preacher?”
“Miss Carrie,” Emma laughed, “I doubt it. My grandfather was a Jew.”
“Of course! That’s it! Maybe he was the Jew!”
“The Jew? Miss Carrie, there are lots of Jews.”
“But not in the South, Emma, you know that. And hardly ever in a wide place in the road like Meadville. Maybe he was the peddler.”
“You do remember!”
“I do now. He came through about four times a year, selling things from his wagon, things we couldn’t get unless we went into Atlanta, which we only did maybe once a year. Toys, dolls, cigars for the men, lace, ready-made dresses.” Miss Carrie paused.
“What?” Emma urged her on. “What?”
Miss Carrie smiled, “Oh, I was just thinking, how we heard a rumor once, from somewhere, maybe Miss Lucy’s cousin wrote from Elberton, down there where they had Negroes, that he’d let them try the dresses on. So for a while no one would touch the Jew’s, Mutt’s, dresses.”
“Mutt?”
“Here, let me see that certificate again. Look—” she pointed— “‘Emmanuel Kaplan.’ Could Mutt have been his nickname?” Emma nodded. Her heart was pounding in her throat. “Go on.”
“Well, anyway, that didn’t last long. We couldn’t resist his finery just because of what someone said.” She smiled. “We decided that that rumor was wrong.”
“Did he have a wife?”
“He did at the end. The last time he came through here.”
“What was her name?”
“Child, I don’t know. I don’t remember. I don’t even know that I knew then. And I only saw her that once.”
“But you did see her?”
“Yes. And I see it now, clear as day. Mutt said that this was his last trip. He was going to be a father. And there was his wife, standing beside the wagon, her dress billowing out in front of her with the child. They were going to end this trip in Atlanta, where he was going to settle down and open a little store.”
“And…”
“Well, I guess her time was closer on her than they thought. Because the child was born here. My mother, who did some midwiving, was one of the women who saw her through over at Mrs. Simpson’s house. I remember Mrs. Simpson talking with my mother about it later in our kitchen. I, being so young, wasn’t supposed to hear, but you know how young people are when somebody’s hiding something from them. I was all ears. Anyway, she said she’d wondered if Jews were more like everybody else. But helping Mrs. Mutt through the birthing of her baby, she saw that neither one of them had a long tail!”
Both of them laughed.
“But,” Miss Carrie continued, “she said, on the other hand, maybe it was just the men.”
“And then what happened?”
“Well, as well as I can recall, a week or so after the baby came—”
“It was a girl?”
“Oh, yes, it was a girl, a pretty little girl. Then they left. I guess they went on to Atlanta like they planned. I never heard anything of them again.”
“And you never saw them in Atlanta?”
“Oh, child, that’s such a big city. It was, to a small-town girl like me, even then. But I bet, Mutt was such a hard-working man, I bet there was a Kaplan’s Dry Goods Store.”
In Atlanta! Where she’d lived for three years. Right under her very nose.
“You could look there.”
“Yes.”
“Is that what you’re going to do?”
“Keep looking till I find her?”
“Yes, go on searching until you find out what you want to know.”
“I don’t know that I’ll ever know that, Miss Carrie.”
The old woman smiled. “I didn’t think so. But,” she said, rising, “you can think about that tonight. Right now, why don’t you come on in the kitchen and help me get supper started. You are going to stay the night?”
“Oh, I couldn’t.”
“Why on earth not? Are you just being polite, or do you think you’d be bored to tears spending the evening with an old lady?”
“Miss Carrie,” Emma laughed, “I’d be delighted.”
* * *
The next morning she waved goodbye to Miss Carrie and headed south again. Well, she had to go back through Atlanta anyway, didn’t she? That was the easiest route.
To where, Emma? she asked herself as she rolled past Gainesville. What’s your final destination? Where’s that place you told Jake you were going? Which reminded her, he’d be worried. She had to give him a call.
Final destination—well, she had to get back to California eventually, didn’t she? Of course—if for no other reason, she had to go back and pick up her things. Had to pick up her passport. Hell, she had to settle things with Jesse. Then why aren’t you driving north toward Chattanooga—back to California, that’s the shortest route. No need to go south at all. Unless you’re going to Atlanta to search for Mutt, his wife and their daughter, Helen, no need at all.
* * *
It was an absolutely beautiful morning with blue skies, just a little breeze which ruffled her hair as she stood in the phone booth by the side of the fast-food store, one hand in the back pocket of her jeans. A convertible pulled in, full of high-school girls there to grab a quick breakfast. Their laughter was like bright scarves loosed in the air.
“He said what?”
“So what did you say?”
Then giggles. Now, these were Southern girls, Emma thought. Blonde with lots of white teeth, and wearing identical sweaters. The hardest decision they’d made all year was what color swimsuit to buy to loll in by the pool at the country club.
“Did you finish Little Foxes?” one of them asked.
“Yes. Wasn’t it great? ’Course by the time old Miz Chapman finishes talking about it, I’ll forget how much I liked it.”
“Why do you think they always do that?” asked another, and then their voices disappeared with them inside the glass doors.
Well, Emma thought. Well, now.
She dropped a handful of change into the phone. First she called West Cypress. Rosalie answered the phone.
“Hi, howyah doing?… Fine. Just called to check in…. The weather here in California? Oh, it’s fine…Daddy’s still asleep? Well, tell him hello for me.” She hoped he’d understand.
She didn’t know for sure she was going to make the second call until she’d already dialed the number from information and it was ringing. What if his wife answered on this Sunday morning?
“Hello?”
“Will?”
“Yes?”
“Will Tucker with the white-blond hair who was waiting to meet me so long ago at State, outside my office?”
“Emma.” He didn’t say her name as if he was surprised, or excited, but more as if he’d been waiting for her call—for almost ten years.
“Where are you?”
“In a phone booth in Gainesville.”
“How long till you’ll be here?”
“About an hour.”
“I’ll be waiting for you at Minnie’s.”
“They still have great pancakes?”
“Did last week.”
* * *
Why, Emma, why? she asked herself, as she threaded her car through Atlanta’s labyrinth of similarly named streets, many of them dead ends and half of them called some variant of Peachtree. Why did you call Will? What on earth do you want from him? Don’t you have enough on your plate without digging up an old lover who told you to get lost ten years ago, who’s married, for Christ’s sakes?
But he wasn’t. He was still as beautiful as the day she had first spied him at the end of the hall, his hair, silvered blond, glowing under the light. But he wasn’t married.
“Emma!” He stood up from the booth in Minnie’s, a pink sweater, almost the same shade as the one she was wearing, draped over his shoulders, khakis, loafers. He was more handsome than ever, trim, a monster grin on his face, but no gold on his finger. She’d bumped int
o him a couple of times after he married, before she ran away to New York. The gold had been there then.
“What on earth are you doing back here? No, wait.” He gestured to the waitress, ordered pancakes for them both, crispy bacon on the side. “And keep the coffee coming,” he said.
“Mr. Tucker, would you like your own pot?”
“Great idea,” he laughed. “Now,” and he zeroed his attention in on Emma’s face, “tell me everything. Everything from the last time I saw you. Shoot.”
She did. She told all, from Atlanta to New York, the trips to Europe, the growing food passion, California, Jesse. When Will pushed her about why she’d left, she added Caroline and Minor. When he asked her what she was doing now in the South, she went all the way back again to Helen, Rosalie, Jake.
When she was through they had long finished the pancakes and the twice-filled coffeepot.
“Let’s walk,” Will said. It wasn’t far to Piedmont Park.
They strolled for a long time in silence, Will’s forehead furrowed, one arm thrown across her shoulder. As they passed the duck pond, she said, “I wonder if those are relatives of those same ducks I used to feed.”
“What?”
“I used to come here and feed them after we split up. I was crazy. I didn’t know what else to do.”
He grinned. “So what else is new?”
“Will?”
“What?”
“Did you think I was crazy then?” She hesitated. “Do you think so now?”
He answered her question with one of his own. “Emma, why did you call me?”
“I don’t know.”
“Yes you do. You called me because I told you something a long time ago that you didn’t like but that you knew was true. And now you want to see if I have any more answers.”
“Like what?”
You know what. It hasn’t changed, Emma. You cozy up to people, but only on your terms. You don’t really need them. That’s the answer to the puzzle about you, baby. That’s the whole shot.”
“I do. I needed you.”
“Nawh.” He shrugged. “You thought you did. But look how well you’ve done without me.”
“How well? I’m on the verge of divorce!”
Keeping Secrets Page 33