by Lee Smith
“Au revoir!” His voice is harsh, yet warm. “I will see you again, mam’selle.” It is a threat as much as a promise.
The calliope cuts into Anna’s creative frenzy; the deck shudders beneath her feet. As always, time has gotten away from her. That fugitive thief, he has stolen most of her life. But she doesn’t begrudge him a minute of this afternoon, for The Louisiana Purchase promises to be every bit as successful as the rest of the Confederacy series: Tupelo Honey, Rainy Night in Georgia, Angel from Montgomery, Carolina on My Mind, Stars Fell in Alabama, The Tennessee Stud, The Missouri Compromise . . .
Anna puts down her pen, pours more cognac into the tulip glass, and goes to stand on her private deck. Sure enough, high-rise Memphis is receding from her eyes, turning into a toy town, though commercial enterprises still line the shore. The whistle blows twice. The engine throbs. The Belle of Natchez moves out onto the water like a dream.
Without warning, Anna’s mind slips back to that other, earlier embarkation on the Daisy Pickett. She stood at the rail then, too, gripping it so tightly that her fingers hurt, laughing like crazy as Baby kept banging the champagne bottle against the corner of the raft, and it just wouldn’t break . . . but no. Anna pulls that particular curtain closed in her mind. She has trained herself not to revisit certain times in her life, for obvious reasons. Pain serves no function at all—as opposed to, say, romance. And Anna wasn’t even herself then, not yet, she was just some earlier trial version of Anna, a dreadfully mousy little hillbilly from West Virginia, now deceased. Anna can scarcely remember that girl, and considers it just as well. She hopes the others on this trip won’t insist on resurrecting her.
Forget the past, let the dead be dead, and live each day as it comes. This is Anna’s message, saying her mantra on the deck: feeling the breeze in her face as the Belle picks up speed, watching Tennessee slip farther and farther away, smelling that old river smell which still threatens to send her right back—damn it—to Paducah, while the manic calliope shrills in her ears and the cognac burns down her throat . . . feeling, feeling this moment for all she’s worth. This is Anna’s message: be here now. And that Huckleberry boy is really not such a bad idea for a hero, not at all, though most heroes are brooding and dark, of course, and a freckled towhead would certainly be a departure . . .
Mile 730
West Memphis, Arkansas
Saturday 5/8/99
1800 hours
HARRIET AND COURTNEY sit at a round table on the upper level of the Paddlewheel Lounge, sipping giant steamboat stompers—billed as the Drink of the Day—which have turned out to be sweet, icy, and bright orange, appropriately enough, as the sun sinks lower and lower over Arkansas. From here they have a fine view down into the bandstand area and out back past the great red paddle wheel as it turns up the muddy wake.
“Heavens!” Courtney fishes around in her stomper, removing all manner of fruit and other tropical debris. “This drink is enormous.”
“That’s okay,” Harriet says, sucking it down through the straw. “I need it. I’m terrified.”
“Oh, come on.” Courtney smiles warmly; she’s decided that she really likes Harriet, such a character.
“This music is so loud,” Harriet says as the albino Little Bobby Blue launches into a tinny version of “Frankie & Johnny” on his honky-tonk piano. Then she leans forward. “Is that Anna, do you think?” She indicates an elegant woman coming up the curved staircase, but no, the woman turns back to laugh with the man behind her. Anna will be alone. The bar is filling up, good thing they grabbed this table.
“I have never seen so many fat people in one place.” Courtney surveys the crowd. “And they’re so tacky.” She would think that the price of this trip would make for a certain, er, level of traveler, but this is clearly not the case. There’s a tattooed, potbellied man at the bar in a red tank top, for instance, chasing his beer with little shot glasses of something vile, laughing too loudly—certainly not the type one would expect to find on a cruise that cost nearly three thousand dollars. Surely he’ll change for dinner . . .
“Well, it’s the river, I think,” Harriet says. “There’s such a romance to it, the idea of going down it, I mean. Why, back in Staunton, when word got out about this trip, people I scarcely knew started coming up to me at the bank or the drugstore or just anywhere, all kinds of people, dying to talk about it. A lot of people have always wanted to do it, I think. It’s sort of a universal fantasy.”
“I suppose so.” This music is loud; these people are fat. Courtney is not sure she’ll be able to bear it for a whole week. Though on the other hand, she can’t wait to tell Gene about it. It’s really his kind of thing.
“Harriet?” But this large woman with the actressy voice bears absolutely no relation to the schoolgirl Anna with her little nasal squeak.
“Anna?” Harriet leaps up to hug her. To their own surprise, both women start squealing in exactly the same way they did after every break and every vacation at Mary Scott when they were girls. Courtney can’t help herself either. She stands up and squeals, too.
“My God, I just can’t believe it!” Catherine Wilson has let her long hair go gray; it curls around her broad, tan, smiling face. She approaches them with a big bearded man in tow, and then they all have to squeal some more. The bartender sends over five big orange stompers on the house.
“Those look lethal,” says Russell Hurt, Catherine’s husband. This is not the husband they were expecting.
“They’re pretty good, though. I think they have ice cream in them.” Harriet is really getting into hers now.
“Jesus.” Russell heads for the bar.
“He just wants a martini.” Catherine leans forward to grasp Anna’s plump, jeweled hand. “My God, Anna. It’s been so long, hasn’t it? And you’re so famous now. What does it feel like?” Catherine was always direct.
Anna purses her plummy lips. Her big glasses have shaded lenses, even indoors; you can’t really see her eyes. “Well, it’s a burden, of course, yet it’s quite gratifying all the same. But it has been a lot of work, believe me!” Her lip starts to quiver.
Catherine squeezes her hand some more. Russell comes back to stand behind his wife’s chair and raise his martini. “To you!” he addresses them all. “To the girls of the Daisy Pickett!”
“The last girls,” Harriet adds oddly, involuntarily, causing everyone to glance at her as they drink. “I mean, they’d call us women in the newspaper if it happened now.”
“To the last girls, then,” Russell Hurt repeats, chuckling. “That’s good.”
“Could you take our picture?” Courtney asks him. “Before you sit back down, I mean.”
“Sure.” Russell puts his drink down on the table, taking Courtney’s expensive camera from her. He backs up a pace or two while the women bunch together.
“It’s all automatic. Just push that little green thing,” Courtney says.
Russell focuses. “Got it! Okay, girls, say ‘Fortune 500’ . . .” The flash goes off.
They will be red-eyed and happy in this photograph, with Courtney poised and expectant on the left; Catherine on the right, head thrown back and laughing, down to earth and natural as ever; Anna in the middle, sitting among her jewelry and scarves and fringes like a foreign idol, smiling mysteriously; then Harriet, whose wide-eyed grinning face pops up behind the others like a hand puppet, like a joke. Later Harriet will look again and again at this picture, just as she looked hard at Anna that afternoon, searching for any trace of the sweet serious friend of her youth. Maybe if Anna just weren’t wearing so much makeup or so many clothes . . .
“Thanks.” Courtney takes the camera back from Russell, already envisioning this photograph in her Belle of Natchez album. She’ll call it, “First Day Out for the Last Girls.” Courtney scoots her chair back to make room for Russell next to his wife, whom he clearly adores, touching her hand constantly, unnecessarily. Hawk never did this, not even when they were young. “So tell us,” Courtney asks them bright
ly, “how did you all meet?”
“Well . . .” Russell hesitates. Catherine nods at him. “Okay. I was deputized by the other guys in my law firm in Birmingham to buy some kind of sculpture for the courtyard in our new office building. We wanted something local—we like to support local artists. I’d been struck by this huge concrete figure I’d seen over at the public gardens; it was sort of a woman, reclining, and sort of a planter. You know, ferns. They had several of them, actually. One was placed half in and half out of a stream. It made a little waterfall. I think that one was some kind of mythological animal or something, wasn’t it, honey?”
“No,” she says. “I just made it up.”
“You’re a sculptor now?” Courtney asks. They all look at Catherine, who looks down at her bare sandaled feet.
“Hell yes, she’s a sculptor.” Russell seems surprised that they don’t know this. “Shit, her work is everywhere, you’ve probably seen it, you just didn’t know it. She’s a very well known artist.”
“Oh, Russell, come on. It’s just stuff for the garden. Yard art,” she tells them. “I really got into it after Steve died.”
“Steve?” Courtney and Harriet look at each other.
“Oh, well, of course I was married to Howie first—”
“For a little while,” Russell winks at them.
“I see we’ve got some catching up to do,” Courtney leans back in her chair.
“Steve was my second husband, a physician, who died. It was a . . . an accident.” Catherine swallows hard. “It was some years later that I met Russell. He came by the house, as he said. I’ve always worked out of my house. Of course I liked him, I liked him right away, but I never thought I’d marry him or anything like that. I wasn’t looking for a husband. I’d had husbands. I thought he was just—I don’t know—an interim man.”
“That’s a great title.” Anna scribbles it down in a little notebook which she produces from somewhere within her person. “Can I have it?”
“Be my guest, I’ll never use it. It’s funny, how much I used to love to write in college. I mean, I know I wasn’t ever particularly good at it”—Catherine waves her hand to override them—“no, I really wasn’t. But I loved it. Or maybe I just loved going to that class and hanging out with y’all. I can still remember the way I always felt when we used to climb up that hill to Miss Auerbach’s house on faculty row, or to Lucian Delgado’s. That feeling like, well, like anything could happen. It was so exciting.”
“Oh, I felt that way, too,” Harriet says. The crackle of leaves beneath your loafers in the fall, the crunch of hard frost under your boots in the wintertime, your bare feet sinking into the cool wet grass of spring.
Bells ring all over the steamboat. They file into the huge dining room, which takes up at least half of the Observation Deck. Red lips gleaming, a pretty girl in a hoop skirt directs them to their table.
“Hi, I’m Maurice, I’ll be your server.” A black boy pulls out their chairs; he looks like a running back.
“Well, Maurice, you’ve got your job cut out for you on this trip,” Russell says. “Think you can help me take care of all these women?”
“No problem!” Maurice flashes a world-class grin, handing the menus around.
“My God, no wonder these people are all so fat!” Courtney takes in the five-course menu selections.
“But they were already fat,” Harriet points out. “Maybe they just picked this cruise because they know they’ll get enough food.” Then she blushes, looking down—she forgot, momentarily, that Anna is clearly a very big woman underneath all that stuff.
“I’ll bet everybody orders every course,” Courtney says. “To get their money’s worth. That’s what my father used to make us all do whenever we went on a trip and the food was included. We all had to be in the clean plate club.”
Prix fixe. Anna knows this term now, but suddenly she remembers all too well a time when she did not, when she knew nothing and said everything wrong because there were so many words she had only read, never heard pronounced, such as the time in American Lit when she said that Hester Prynne was not immoral, but rather had been simply misled, pronouncing the word to rhyme with “chiseled.” Everybody had sat in silence until they got it and then started laughing, one by one. Anna herself never found this incident amusing. The point was that she’d read all those words, but had never said them aloud before she went to college.
“I’m with your dad,” Russell is saying to his wife. “I still like to get my money’s worth.” He orders artichoke bottoms with crabmeat, rack of lamb, and Black Forest cake. “Go, girl! This is the clean plate club,” he tells Catherine, who orders next. They seem like the perfect couple, which doesn’t surprise her old friends. She’s easy to get along with. She and Howie seemed like the perfect couple, too, which they were until she left him. And now, secretly, Catherine sometimes feels like leaving Russell who is driving her crazy with this midlife crisis of his which has been going on forever, it seems to her. “Just hush,” she wants to say. “Quit whining. Act like a man.” She knows she ought to be glad that Russell is so sensitive and verbal, but she’s not. She’s tired of it. She wishes he’d just shut up. Now, now. Be nice, Catherine cautions herself. She read someplace that the three rules for a successful marriage are: Be nice. Be nice. Be nice. This ought to be simple, but every year it gets harder and harder to do. Catherine is older now. She gets tired, too. And this is her only life.
Courtney orders the consommé and two salads. There’s scarcely a thing on the menu that she can eat if she expects to remain a size six by the time she gets to New Orleans.
“Look over there,” Harriet says suddenly. “It’s Mark Twain.”
“Actually it looks more like Mr. Gaines, remember him? Whatever happened to him, anyway?” Catherine asks.
“No, that’s the Riverlorian,” Courtney has been studying the daily Steamboatin’ News. “He’s the guy who lectures about the river. I think his lectures start tomorrow morning.”
“Mr. Gaines went to some college in Florida, I believe, when he didn’t get tenure at Mary Scott, the year after we all left. And his marriage broke up after that,” Anna offers, and they suddenly remember that Anna had an academic husband herself, what was his name, that skinny pale guy . . . Kenneth. That’s it. He was getting his doctorate at UNC. Whatever happened to Kenneth? “I believe Mr. Gaines was taking advantage of his students,” Anna adds primly. “Of Baby, for instance.” She hadn’t meant to say it. She doesn’t say, of me.
“Now Anna, I’ll bet you don’t know that for sure.” Harriet looks like she might cry. She always loved Mr. Gaines. In fact, it’s hard for Harriet to imagine that Mr. Gaines is not right there still, at Mary Scott, just as it’s hard for her to imagine that all these other girls have run through whole marriages, whole lives.
The first course arrives in a flurry of little dishes deftly served by Maurice. Russell orders champagne. Courtney and Catherine compare pictures of their families. Between them, Catherine and Russell have six children, seven grandchildren. How can this be? Harriet wonders. The champagne arrives. Russell approves the bottle, looking over the rim of his reading glasses. Out on the parquet dance floor, couples are moving with intricate steps and turns. Arthur Murray, Harriet thinks darkly. They’ve all been to Arthur Murray.
Courtney clears her throat. “I’d like to propose a toast,” she announces. “To Baby.”
“To Baby.”
“To Baby.”
“To Baby.”
They lift their glasses.
“She must have been a helluva girl.” Russell is the only one who didn’t know her.
“Oh Lord! You can’t even imagine!” Catherine says. “There was nobody like her. Thank you,” she says as Maurice arrives with her salmon.
“Nobody,” Harriet whispers, twisting her napkin.
“Well, no wonder,” Courtney says. “Don’t you remember her family? I think Baby did pretty well, considering.”
“What was her famil
y like?” Russell is the perfect straight man.
“They were just so rich,” Courtney says. “They’d been rich for generations. You should have seen her parents’ house in Alabama—antebellum, of course. Ten columns across the front.”
“Twelve,” Harriet murmurs. “Miles and miles of land . . .”
Catherine puts down her fork and leans forward. “Okay. Here’s the perfect anecdote, the anecdote that captures it all. You probably remember this, too—you were there.” She nods toward Harriet, who looks doubtful. “Anyway, I was in your room—we were working the Ouija board, you and me, Harriet.”
“Oh!” Harriet had forgotten all about the Ouija board.
“And the phone rang, and Baby picked it up. ‘What?’ she said real loud, and then, ‘Well, are you okay?’ and then, ‘I’m just so glad you’re okay.’ Then there came this long silence during which she was listening, and twisting her hair around her finger the way she did”—they all nod—“and then she said, ‘Well, all I can say, Troy, is that if I were you, I’d go right out and get him another one just like it before he gets back from his trip.’”
“Oh my God,” Harriet says. “I do remember that.”
“What was it about?” Russell asks. “Another what?”
“Another station wagon,” Catherine says. “See, she had these wild twin brothers, Troy and—”
“Boy,” Harriet says.
“Troy and Boy,” Catherine goes on. “Troy being named for her father, Troy Beauchamp Ballou, though I can’t actually remember Boy’s real name right now, but it was a long string of family names, very impressive. Anyway, they were about sixteen, I’d say, maybe seventeen, and they got drunk and went driving around the golf course in the middle of the night, of all things, and somehow they had managed to drive their father’s station wagon straight into one of the water hazards, actually I think it was a lake, where it was completely submerged.”