As if she had caught my feeling, Glynn came over to me and hugged me suddenly and fiercely. She walked me to the Jeep, her arm still around my waist.
“Tell Dad all about everything,” she said loudly. “I know you’ll be talking to him every day. I’ll bet he’ll call tonight. Tell him about the trees and the mountains and Curtis and…everything. Tell him maybe I’ll call him in a day or two. Will you tell him?”
“I’ll tell him,” I said, hugging her and feeling the edge of her bones, that were perhaps just a shade less sharp than they had been.
We drove away in silence and bounced over old cobbles toward the waterfront and an outdoor restaurant T.C. knew. He looked over at me and grinned, and said, “I think I’ve just been warned to keep my distance or her daddy will beat me up.”
“What a silly thing to say; not at all,” I said prissily, heard myself, and smiled unwillingly.
“Maybe a little,” I said. “She’s never seen me around any man but her father for any length of time. I think it never occurred to her that I would be, you know, up there alone with you, until this minute. That unsubtle little message was for me, not for you.”
“I wouldn’t think you were in the habit of making eyes at strange men,” he said.
“Well, of course I’m not. I didn’t mean she thought that. I just meant…Oh, Lord, I don’t know what I meant and I don’t feel like analyzing it. I’m not about to put the move on you and I don’t imagine for a moment that you will on me. In fact, I plan to leave you strictly alone to pursue your earthquakes. I am going to sleep prodigiously, and read enormously, and eat disgracefully, and by the time I have filled my quota of all three Laura will be back and we’ll be gone.”
“And I’ll be sorry,” he said equably. “You’re good company, you and Glynn, and I’ve enjoyed this morning with both of you. And Curtis is as lovesick as a puppy. Like I said, conquer and run. You’re all alike. Did your sister say when she’d be back, by the way?”
“No. She said she’d let me know. I don’t imagine it will be long—”
“I don’t think I’d count on that.”
I looked at him.
“The tone speaks louder than the words,” I said. “You want to tell me what you meant by that?”
“Nothing unkind. Really. I just…I’ve seen more than a few other pretty women leave that lodge like bats out of torment early in the mornings. Mostly they don’t come back. Your sister is a pretty woman and a nice one, and I don’t want you to worry about her, and I expect you do a lot of that. I think you’ve got enough on your plate right now. I want you to be able just to kick back and let the woods do what they do.”
It was an extraordinary little speech to make to a stranger, especially since much of it was uncannily accurate, and it annoyed me both in its familiarity and its accuracy.
“Do you dabble in dysfunctional family therapy too?” I said sourly.
“No, but I’m a member of a family that gives new luster to the word dysfunctional. I know the signs. I’m sorry. I spoke out of turn. Comes from being a hermit. Us hermits are the world’s worst blabbermouths if you give us a chance. Never start a conversation with a hermit or you’ll be stuck for the millennium.”
“No need to apologize. But I’d be interested to know how you knew about us—or thought you did. Us Southern women are raised never to show our true feelings in public.”
“Don’t I know that,” he said. “Well, if you really want to know, I’ll tell you over a Bloody Mary and cold crab. But not until then. I’m too faint with hunger to poke around in psyches, mine or yours.”
“If I show you my psyche, you’ve got to show me yours,” I said, feeling the morning’s easy familiarity slide back. I could, after all, I thought, tell this man anything. I could feel no harm anywhere in him. The very fact that he was a stranger and would remain one was both license and armor. I realized suddenly how very liberating anonymity was. It’s the reason, I thought, that you can talk about things to people on airplanes that you’d never tell another soul at home. There’s no context between you. Anything goes in a vacuum; the very lack of any history between you is like a shot of Demerol.
The restaurant sat hard by the south end of San Francisco Bay, next to the yacht club and marina where, Glynn had said, Marcie’s father had a membership and there was a plethora of cool boys. I tried to imagine my daughter into the scene, splashing in the azure pool that was visible over a jacaranda hedge; climbing aboard one of the sleek, white sailboats bobbing at their moorings; running in a group of wet, seal-brown adolescents toward the snack bar. I could see the Glynn I had found in California, but not the one I had left home seeking. I shook my head. I wasn’t much for Bloody Marys, and the one I was sipping was my second.
It seemed to me to be quite late. We had not gotten a table until after one, and we had drunk and talked, or sat in comfortable silence watching the very white sails on the very blue bay and the green mountains above them, for what felt like a long time. I had a nagging sense of something left undone, somewhere I had to be, but the sun was warm on my head and shoulders and the breeze was cool and soft on my face, and the flowering vines and tubs of blooms on the outdoor deck where we sat were hypnotic, and gradually the feeling faded. The vodka helped too, undoubtedly. By the time the crabs came, huge and rosy and served with lime wedges and a wonderful thyme-flavored sauce, I was almost totally a creature of indolence and sensation. I had shucked off my heavy shirt and sat in Stuart Feinstein’s “Eat Your Breakfast” tee, feeling the sun running in my veins out to the tips of my toes and fingers. I kept wanting to yawn and stretch until all my joints popped. I did a fair amount of it.
T.C. half-sat, half-slouched across from me, his feet in huge, scuffed hiking boots, propped in an empty chair, eating lime wedges. He had taken off his jacket, too, and wore a handsome, heavy Oxford cloth shirt with the sleeves rolled halfway up his brown forearms. It was faded blue and became him. I knew that it was Brooks Brothers; Pom had dozens of them. For some reason that surprised me. A hermit in a Brooks Brothers button-down? He had removed the mended wire-rimmed glasses and replaced them with a pair of dark yellow aviator’s glasses, also bent and mended, that gave his coal-chip eyes the inhuman glitter of a wild animal’s. The white teeth and the black beard and hair, with red highlights glistening now in the sun, added to the impression of a predator. But his hawk’s face was slack with sun and liquor and good humor, and his smile had a singular sweetness, like a sleepy child’s. There was a scattering of tiny black freckles across the bridge of his nose; I had not noticed them before. Celt freckles; Pom had a few of them, too.
“Are you Scottish or Irish?” I asked, breaking the long, sun-humming silence.
“English as far back as the Domesday Book, or so I’m told. With some Yamacraw Indian thrown in, though nobody in my family will admit to it. I think it was one reason nobody made much of a fuss when I took off West. Sooner or later they probably would have paid me to stay away so nobody could see the Yamacraw in my face. Nobody else in the clan has it.”
He said it so mildly that I wondered if he were joking.
“Why do you ask?” he said, leaning his head so far back that it hung over the back of the Adirondack chair, leaving his throat bare. I saw that it was pale. He was not naturally dark, then, but brown with sun and wind. Again like Pom. I was obscurely glad that his eyes were black-brown and not Pom’s spotlight blue.
“My husband has those freckles and he’s a Celt,” I said, and then blushed hotly and was angry with myself for the blush. Lord, what a ninny, I thought fiercely. This is not prom night.
But he only said, “Ah,” and went on lolling his head back, eyes closed against the slanting sun. He looked as boneless and inert as a ventriloquist’s dummy that had been tossed across the chair. I sat up straighter and looked at my watch, shaking my head to clear the sweet lassitude from it. Three forty-five.
“Do you realize that we’ve sat here guzzling vodka and stuffing our faces for almost three h
ours?” I said.
He snapped his head back down.
“You need to get back?” he said, yawning.
“I thought I’d call Glynn—”
“Why?”
“Well…just to see that she’s settled in. Let her know where I’ve been, in case she’s tried to call—”
“I’ve got an answering machine,” he said. “Pringle won’t have a phone, but he still doesn’t want to miss the four hundred calls he gets every day. He put in the machine before I even moved in. You can call her back if she’s called.”
“It’s just that it’s the first time she’s been away from me for this long in a strange place, besides camp, and she knows everybody there.”
“She’s not going into the heart of darkness, only the heart of Palo Alto. Though they may be one and the same, at that. How old is she, anyway? Sometimes she looks twelve, and others you can see the woman she’s going to be. Some woman, too.”
“She’s sixteen,” I said curtly. Put that way, it did sound ridiculous, my fussing about my daughter.
“So why do you hover? Has she been sick? She’s awfully thin, you know. Well, of course you do. Anorexia, isn’t it?”
“Not anymore,” I said, biting my words off short and staring at him levelly. “She’s gained a good bit since she’s been out here. And yes, we’ve had treatment and therapy for her; the best. It’s working, and I wasn’t aware that I hover. How do you know so much about anorexia, anyway?”
“Oldest daughter had it. It was during the time her mother and I were going through our divorce. A bad time all the way around. She was fourteen then; she didn’t have any other weapons. We should have seen it before we did.”
“How is she now?” I said, my annoyance vanishing. So he had walked that bad road, too. Glynn’s thinness must hurt him to see. He couldn’t know how much better she was.
“She’s dead,” he said, looking down into his glass, where melting ice turned the remnants of the Bloody Mary pink.
“Oh, my God—”
“No, no. Not from the anorexia. I think we’d mostly licked that. That’s what made it so—awful. It was an automobile accident. She was with some kids driving up the Delta to a Christmas party in a town upriver, and they went straight into a semi. It was late, and the kid driving had been drinking. We should have been on top of that, too, but we were so glad she was beginning to date and go to parties that we didn’t…we should have talked to her, of course; we should have called the kid’s parents before they ever left, or something—”
He broke off and sucked the pink water through his straw, making a rattling, blatting sound. His face was shuttered and his eyes were blank. I felt tears spring to my eyes and a lump form in my throat, and reached over and put my hand over his.
“I’m so awfully sorry,” I said. “I didn’t mean to pry. It must be…terrible.”
“Yes. It is.”
And then he looked up and smiled.
“I’ve got two other kids. A girl named Katie and a boy named Tom. After me. The T.C. is for Thomas Carlyle. Family names, both of them; the old man never read a book in his life. But it used to embarrass me at school, so I started using the initials. Tom’s starting to do it, too. Drives the whole family nuts. They’re good kids. I’ll be seeing them in the fall.”
“I gather they’re back home…where?”
“Greenville, Mississippi. Heart of the Delta. From your accent I’d say you were no stranger to that country.”
“No. Louisiana for me; Baton Rouge. I went to LSU, and then to Atlanta to work, and that’s where I’ve been ever since. I’ve never been out of the South except traveling. I knew you were from the Delta. There’s no other accent quite like it.”
“And no other place. Thank God. Yep, they’re in Greenville with their mama, and likely to stay there till they’re planted in the family plot. Tom’s starting the university at Oxford this fall, and Katie is knee-deep in cotillions and debuts and all that retro stuff we do so well on the Delta. They’re like their mother; they’re absolutely certain-sure of their place, their world. I’m glad for them. They won’t spend their lives wandering around looking for the place they’re meant to be. But I miss them. It’s all I do miss of that territory back there, those kids. I wish I could see them in my place, up there”—and he gestured toward the mountains—“but that’s not going to happen, I don’t think.”
“They don’t like it up there?”
“They don’t know it up there. Annabelle won’t let them come, and they can’t do it on their own until they’re eighteen. She thinks I deserted them for the West, and she doesn’t think the life of a hermit is a proper example. She’s probably right. God knows what they tell their friends I do. I see them back home when I see them. Of course, it’s not really me they see there, so I guess they’ll never really get to know me. But it’s better than nothing.”
“I don’t think I like this Annabelle,” I said.
“Me either, much, now,” he said. “But God, I was so crazy about her when I first met her that I practically went trotting around after her baying like a hound. She was a cheerleader at Ole Miss and I was a professional fraternity boy devoting myself to drinking and screwing and making just good enough grades to stay in school and keep on doing both. Not that you could screw Miss Annabelle Pritchard of Oak Grove Plantation. Her daddy would bite your ass off. So I married her about two hours after her graduation. It was a garden wedding at Oak Grove. I would have married her in a Buddhist ceremony to get in her pants. And I have to say, in those early years she was something. The perfect wife for a good old Delta boy living off his daddy while he decided what to do with himself. It was only when I started to change that she did. Or rather, didn’t. I realize now that I asked a literal impossibility of her, but then we shouldn’t have gotten married in the first place. We just should have screwed till we got it out of our system. She was on the pill from the time she was sixteen, no matter what her daddy thinks.”
“You don’t like your family much.” It was not a question.
He laughed.
“Not worth shit. It’s entirely mutual.”
“Why?”
He raised the black eyebrows.
“For a proper Southern lady you sure do ask a lot of questions.”
“Oh, Lord, that was rude, wasn’t it? I don’t know what got into me. I’d absolutely never do that at home—”
“Precisely. You’re a different person out here. Like I am. Don’t apologize; it’s just what I hoped would happen to you. Well. My family. What to say about my family that Faulkner didn’t say better? My family has always had land and money and pale skin and blond hair and bluer blood than anybody else in the entire Delta, or so the conventional wisdom goes. And not a brain in the lot of them. My grandfather owned a bank in a little town near Greenville called Pennington, and by the time he died he all but owned the town, too. My father took over both in his time, and now my brother, Cleve, is running things. I was supposed to; I was the oldest son. But I hated that damned bank like poison ivy; there was no way anybody was going to get me into the bank or the life that went with it. And tell you the truth, I don’t think my father minded too much; here was this dour black cuckoo in that shiny isinglass family nest; it just wasn’t seemly. Old Cleve looked the part and wanted the bank worse than hell, so when I cut out Daddy just moved him right on in there. It was the right thing to do. Cleve is the best bank president in Pennington, Mississippi, which is to say the only one.”
“So what did you do? How did you get out here?”
“First I thought I wanted to be a newspaperman, so Daddy got me a job on the Greenville paper. He owned a chunk of that. I was a good writer; still am. Freelance writing is how I earn my living. But I hated the reporting part. I had to go interview the families of murder victims, of people who’d drowned in the river or gotten squashed on the highway, or of little kids who’d died of just plain being poor; black families who’d been tornadoed out of their shacks and trailer parks�
��I couldn’t do it. I quit after a year. Then I worked in the research library at Ole Miss. I liked that pretty much, but by that time the sense that I wasn’t in the right place was starting to eat at me. And things were starting to sour with Annabelle. I brought a couple of black coworkers home to dinner once or twice, and she just couldn’t make the jump. I didn’t like being told who I could have in my house and who I couldn’t, so I started staying away a lot.
“About that time I got offered a job in a big PR firm in Jackson, and she didn’t want to move, and I couldn’t stay around Greenville and Pennington anymore, with my whole family nipping at my heels like hounds at a coon.…I don’t know, I just picked up and moved to Jackson. I thought for a while I could come home on weekends and eventually persuade Annabelle to move, but you’d do better trying to get a penguin to move to the equator. She just couldn’t do it. All her…her self was tied up in the town and the house and her clubs and the kids and her mama and daddy, and mine, and the plantation—and none of mine was. Then I got sent to a convention in Berkeley, and came up to those mountains with a guy I met who was a great hiker, and we got up there into the redwood country, and something in the ground just ran up out of it and through the soles of my feet and up into me, and I knew that that was it; there it was. That was my place, and that would be where I found out who I really was. So I started coming back whenever I could, and after the divorce and my daughter…after that, I just went up there one time and stayed. By that time Daddy had died and left me enough money to live on for a long time if I’m careful. I think he always meant me to clear out of the Delta, because he left property and stock to Cleve and my sister and cash to me. I found a place in Palo Alto and got a job in the Stanford library, just filing and sorting at first, but I didn’t care; it wasn’t a career I wanted. And every weekend I went up into the Santa Cruz’s. And one weekend I found the fire tower and followed the trail down to the lodge, and old Caleb baby was there with a toots, and I knocked on the door and told him I’d look after his property in exchange for living in his fire tower. He asked me about money, and I thought he meant for me to pay rent, so I said I thought I could manage a little bit every month, and he laughed and said that what he’d meant was how much I wanted. I said I didn’t want any, just the tower, and I meant it; I didn’t want to be too beholden to him. So he said sure. I never did like him, but I came as close as I ever did then. And I’ve been here ever since.”
Fault Lines Page 26