The Last Girls

by Lee Smith

  Weeping and talking and smoking cigarettes, the family came and went. “It’s hopeless,” the thin woman in the pantsuit hissed at them all. In her mind, Harriet had nicknamed her the Ice Princess, but in reality, she turned out to be Mr. Carr’s oldest daughter, Marianne; the other daughter was thin, too, but nicer, crying silently into a wad of Kleenex and tapping her slender foot. Her worried young husband sat beside her, stroking her hair. Cousins and servants came and went. Jefferson Carr did not come, as he was far away, at the boarding school up north. A plump young Episcopal minister who looked like something out of The Canterbury Tales appeared with his tight collar, his bulging cheeks. They admitted him immediately; he came out shaking his head. Harriet ate a bag of Fritos and read Tess. Several nice men in suits showed up. They spoke reassuringly to the family, nodded to Harriet as if they knew her, then arranged themselves in chairs by the bay window, which gave out onto a wintry little park.

  A black woman named Viola appeared with a big silver tray of fried chicken, deviled eggs, and roast beef sandwiches. Until then, Harriet had not realized she was starving. She ate and ate. “This is the best chicken I’ve ever had,” she said, taking another drumstick. Viola beamed, squeezing Harriet’s hand. Jeff loved her, Harriet remembered. He was always talking about Viola.

  A general flurry ensued as the outer door opened again and a heavyset woman came in pushing a wheelchair and calling out, “Here she is!” It was Mrs. Herring, Mr. Carr’s secretary. Harriet recognized the deep Southern drawl she’d heard so often on the phone. And the woman in the wheelchair must be Mrs. Carr, who didn’t look crazy at all, only frail and sick. Someone had given her a hairdo that very instant, it looked like, spraying her thin blond hair into a transparent halo around her head through which the scary outline of her skull was visible. Her bright red lipstick made a garish gash across her face. “Mama!” her daughters cried. Cousins crowded around. The men in the suits stood up at their chairs.

  “Oh, Viola,” Mrs. Carr said, ignoring them all, “there’s a bat in the Florida room, you’ll have to get it out immediately, I won’t go back in there until you do.”

  “Yasm,” Viola said.

  “How many times do I have to tell you to close that flue? Always close the flue,” Mrs. Carr went on. But she seemed to have thought of something else by then, mumbling, looking down to pick at the sleeve of her gray wool suit.

  “Doesn’t she look pretty?” Mrs. Herring said to them all.

  “Doesn’t she know about Daddy?” the younger sister asked.

  “Well, I’ve told her,” Mrs. Herring said. A little silence fell. Violet arc lights came on among the dark branches of the trees outside the window. Mrs. Carr picked at her sleeve. “Mary Tate, Mary Tate,” Mrs. Herring said. “Look here, Mary Tate, your whole family is here, isn’t that nice?”

  Mrs. Carr held her head up then and looked around, balancing her luminous hairdo carefully. “Well, they’re all going to hell!” she snapped.

  But Mrs. Herring was wheeling the chair forward. “I suppose this is as good a time as any for her to pay her last respects to Mr. Carr,” she said to the assembled crowd, clearly relishing her role.

  “Dabney is going to hell, too,” Mrs. Carr announced cheerfully over her shoulder. “Dabney will burn, burn, burn.”

  “Code blue, Room 2, code blue, Room 2,” the intercom crackled.

  “Oh!” the younger sister began to wail.

  “My God, it is too late.” Mrs. Herring pressed her hand to her heart.

  Viola grabbed the wheelchair. “Less us just go on home now, Miss Mary Tate,” she said. “You come along with Viola. I bet you haven’t had no decent supper yet neither.”

  “They don’t know how to cook a thing up on that hill,” Mrs. Carr said. “They make a pancake as hard as a rock.”

  Everybody in the waiting room was crying now. Harriet put all her books in her book bag, then stood up and put on her coat. One of the men in suits came over and thrust something into her coat pocket just as the steel doors opened; later, she’d see it was a hundred-dollar bill. “Mama!” Harriet rushed forward to her but the other two men were already there somehow, escorting Alice out, dragging her really, Mama’s blond curls wild and her cheeks fiery red like the circles of rouge on a kewpie doll. She sobbed uncontrollably. A magic path opened before Mama and the men, like the Red Sea, Harriet thought, grabbing two more pieces of chicken and some sandwiches from Viola’s abandoned tray and stuffing them into her bookbag as she followed.

  They did not go back to Richmond for the funeral.

  Mile 597.4

  Montgomery Point

  Sunday 5/9/99

  1600 hours

  COURTNEY PAUSES AT THE door before heading out onto the deck where they’re all to meet before the Captain’s Champagne Reception. The warm breeze stirs her hair and she can feel it curling, well, frizzing around her face, it’s something about the humidity out here on the water. Thank God for curling irons—Courtney uses the large two-inch diameter kind, which actually straightens her hair out. Suddenly she remembers the day Gene burned his hand on it; she’d plugged it in in his bathroom while she showered.

  “Oh my God!” he screeched. “What is this instrument of torture? My darling? Is this yours? What ghastly thing are you planning to do with it? Should I flee while there’s still time?”

  Courtney stepped out of the shower to grab Gene’s hand and run cold water over it at the sink. “I’m so sorry,” she said. “Here, this’ll help.”

  “Butter,” Gene said. “What about butter? That’s what my beloved sainted mother always used to put on a burn, bless her heart.”

  Courtney laughed. “Oh, nobody believes in that anymore,” she told him. “That’s old hat. It’s all cold now—cold water, ice.”

  Gene slipped his free hand around her wet waist. “Very impressive. How do you know all that?”

  “Easy,” Courtney told him. “I’m a mom.”

  “Such a mom,” Gene said into the wet hair at the back of her neck.

  “Gene—” One of the unwritten rules for their Wednesdays together was that they never mention her kids.

  “Listen”—he had both arms around her now, while the water ran on in the sink—“I think you’re a great mom. I really do. I wish you were my mom.”

  Courtney had to laugh. “Oh, stop it,” she said.

  “But then I couldn’t do this, could I?” Gene had asked. “Or this—” Courtney stands dead still on the deck as the memory of what Gene Minor did next sweeps over her like the hot breezy Arkansas air. She was watching him in the mirror the whole time. Later Gene refused to let her use her diabolical curling iron, so her hair sprang up in loopy curls all over her head while they sat out in his garden for it to dry. (She had smoothed them out, of course, the minute she got back home, not that Hawk would have even noticed, but still . . .) “I am enchanted!” Gene had announced, standing behind her, running his fingers through the curls, holding her head like a ball in both big hands. “You little pre-Raphaelite mom, you!” He massaged her head, the most wonderful sensation. Nobody had ever done that to her before. Courtney leaned back in the old Adirondack chair. “Did I mention that I’m a licensed phrenologist?” Gene asked.

  “Why, no,” she said dreamily.

  “An oversight, then. But let me just tell you, you have some very promising bumps on this head, Mrs. Ralston, bumps that augur extremely well for your future happiness. This one right here, for instance” (he rubbed it) “would be your lump of Venus. I find it to be extremely well situated and highly developed—”

  But now Anna and Harriet are waving to her, all dressed up for the reception. They must wonder why she’s standing here like an idiot staring into the sun when the truth is, she just has to talk to him right now, no matter what.

  “I have to make a call.” She waves back to them. “I almost forgot. I’ll be back in a little while. I’ll be back for dinner if not before.”

  They nod and smile, uncomprehending. Courtney w
aves again, then dashes back to her stateroom where she unlocks the door and dials. She has to look up the number of the flower shop in her little leather book.

  “Gene?” she asks.

  “Baby?”

  “It’s me,” she says. Then she can’t talk anymore.

  “Hey, baby, hang on, I’m just going back here for a little privacy, these dizzy broads I’ve got in here, they’re hanging on every word.” Courtney can hear the high-pitched voices of Miss Violet Perdue and Eugenia Reap; in spite of herself, she smiles. “I’m almost there, just a minute now.” Suddenly his voice is clearer, closer.

  “Exactly where are you?” she asks.

  Gene chuckles. “In the cooler. Along with three thousand dollars worth of roses, lilies, and baby’s breath, all white. We’re doing the Pennypacker girl’s wedding and reception. Her daddy’s name is Worth Pennypacker. It really is. Ain’t that a trip? So Dickens. Okay, baby, what’s on your mind? Aside from the fact that you miss me horribly and life isn’t worth living without me and you realize this completely now.”

  “Oh God,” Courtney says. “It’s true.”

  “And you’re going to tell old what’s-his-name to kiss your ass the minute you set foot on dry land again—”

  “Gene, be serious.”

  “I am serious, baby. I am serious as a heart attack, as my beloved sainted mother used to say.”

  “Gene, you know I can’t do that. We’ve already had this conversation.”

  “But why can’t you do it, babycakes, light of my life, joy of my heart, my sweet babushka, my popsie, my little cabbage rose?”

  “Gene! Gene, stop it, listen—”

  Gene breathes heavily into the phone. “I am listening,” he says.

  “I just talked to Ellen Henley today—that’s Hawk’s secretary—and I’m afraid this is all a lot more serious than I thought, more than just a ministroke, I mean, or some kind of temporary thing. Ellen Henley claims that this memory problem has been going on for months, and she’s been covering it up. Oh, Gene, I’m afraid there’s something terrible the matter with him. I’m afraid he’s really sick.”

  “So? Look, the guy has been unfaithful to you for years, Courtney. He’s embarrassed you, he’s treated you like shit. I’m sorry he’s sick, but that doesn’t change anything. He’s done what he’s done, and you know it. You’ve got to stand up for yourself no matter what, whether he’s sick or not.”

  This conversation is not going the way Courtney hoped. “Look, Gene, I just called because I was thinking about you. I didn’t mean for us to get into all this stuff again. We already talked about it, and I explained to you that you’re just not being reasonable. You know I want to be with you more than anything in the world, darling. But this is my duty.”

  “What if I told you that you have a duty to yourself, Courtney? A duty to be honest, for a change? What if I told you that you have a duty to me?” Gene doesn’t sound like himself at all.

  “Gene, that’s ridiculous. I certainly can’t leave Hawk right now.”

  “When, then? When can you do it?”

  “Well, later. I’m not sure, exactly. Whenever Hawk gets through this medical crisis, whatever it is.”

  “Courtney, that could be years. Or never.”

  “Oh, I don’t think so, I’m sure it’s really nothing to worry about. We ought to know something by next week, I feel sure of it. Then we can talk about this other.” The tone she knows Vangie hates has come into her voice; Courtney hears it herself, but there’s nothing she can do about it now. This is the way she is. It’s even what Gene loves about her, he’s said so, many times: the polished preppy exterior, the predictable behavior hiding the woman within—like a bag lady in a porn flick, he says, who looks just awful until she starts taking off her clothes. Gene Minor is the only one who knows she exists.

  “This other? That’s how you think about us, about you and me? This other? Other than what? Your real life, I suppose.”

  Exactly, she does not say, thinking of her photograph albums, all those pictures where Gene is not. It kills her to think this. But no decent person could leave somebody who’s sick, for heaven’s sake! “Darling, you know that’s not what I mean. You know how much I love you. But it will take me a little time, that’s all, to work things out.”

  “How much time? Until Hawk gets well? Because he may never get well. What if it’s Alzheimer’s? People live with Alzheimer’s for years and years. So how much time are we talking here? How about until all the children get married?”

  Courtney nods and starts to agree but clearly he’s not serious, he’s going on and on, it’s like a long bad joke.

  “Or how about this? How about until all the children die? Of course by then we might be dead, too, but what the hell, at least we wouldn’t have upset anybody, would we?”

  “Gene, what has gotten into you?” But suddenly Courtney knows. “It’s that woman, isn’t it? That woman with the stupid name, what is it? . . . Rosalie Hungerheart. You called her, didn’t you?”

  “Well, I can’t talk to you,” Gene says. “You’re off on some goddamn boat.”

  “I knew it!” Suddenly everything falls into place. This is not Gene at all, not the real Gene, her Gene, her Wednesday lover, her secret prince. “I can’t believe you would be so susceptible to that pop psychology.”

  “It’s not pop psychology.”

  “No? Well, what is it, then?”

  “It’s common sense,” Gene says. “It’s talking turkey.”

  Courtney just cannot believe this.

  “Look”—he goes on in the most reasonable voice imaginable, it’s driving her wild—“look, it’s very simple. There’s a clear choice here. You can choose love, which is life, or you can choose not love, which is not life, which is death, which is the way you’ve been living for years and years. Look, Courtney, most people don’t even get the choice. They lead lives of quiet desperation, as the fellow said.”

  “Oh, Gene, quit being so dramatic.”

  “Sometimes I’m dramatic,” he allows. “But this is real. I want my life, Courtney. I want you.”

  “But—”

  “No buts. Either you want me or you don’t.”

  “But Gene, you have to understand how hard this is for me. I’ve never done a thing I wanted to in my whole life, except for being with you. I’ve done as I was told and then as I thought I should.”

  “I know that, honey. It breaks my heart. You’ve been breaking my heart for years.”

  “Then why can’t we just go on like we have been until things calm down? Why not? Why can’t we just have this weekend together in New Orleans? I know it’s that woman. I know she’s put you up to this.”

  “She did not put me up to anything, Courtney. She just helped me to see the issues more clearly, that’s all. I needed some help. You do, too.”

  “You know her name isn’t really Hungerheart.” Courtney can’t help saying this. “Nobody’s name is Hungerheart.”

  “This is me, baby,” Gene says. “Just me. Just forget Miss Hunger-heart. And I’m telling you that I don’t want to go on like we’ve been going on for years now. I’m old, you’re old, and I’m just not willing to do it anymore. So I’m offering you a choice, that’s all. I’ll meet you in New Orleans on Saturday the way we’ve planned, and we’ll have a great weekend, and then we’ll go back to Raleigh and you can tell Hawk that you’re leaving, and he can mobilize Mary Bell and Ellen Henley and Lucille and all his girlfriends and his vast millions to take care of him. You know they’ll do it. They’ll all snap to. They won’t even miss you. Besides, you’ll be replaced by next year with a newer, younger, blonder Mrs. Hawk.”

  Courtney is terrified that this is true. “But I can’t do it right now,” she whispers. This is true, too.

  “Okey-dokey, then. That’s it. Then I can’t make it down for the weekend either—you’ll just have to shop instead of having breakfast in bed with me. You’d probably rather shop anyway.”

  “Gene—
” Dammit, now she’s crying. But then something snaps inside causing her to sit up straight on the bed, fists digging furiously into her eyes. How dare he? This—this—florist! She hasn’t been Mrs. Henry Ralston IV all these years for nothing. “I can’t believe you actually have the nerve to put me on the spot like this. I do not have to suffer this kind of abuse,” Courtney says, “and I refuse to be coerced. Do you hear me, Gene? I simply refuse.”

  “Whoa. You sound like a rich lady I used to know,” Gene says.

  “Well, I’m certainly not going to respond to this—this—ultimatum.”

  “Okay.” Suddenly Gene sounds tired. “That’s it, then. Call me sometime, after you get back. I’d like to keep in touch anyway.”

  He can’t be serious. “Gene—”

  “Look, baby, I’m freezing my ass off in here. It’s damned appropriate though, if you think about it.”

  “What do you mean?” she can’t help asking.

  “Oh, none of this ‘gather ye rosebuds while ye may’ shit, not for Mrs. Ralston. Freezing our rosebuds on the stem, that’s more like it. Nip them in the bud while there’s still time or else, God forbid, they might actually bloom, and we can’t have that, can we, Mrs. Ralston? Can we now? No late flowering for Mrs. Ralston. No Indian summer, no second spring. In fact, Mrs. Ralston prefers silk flower arrangements in general, so much more practical, so much easier, so much less mess—”

  Courtney takes a deep breath. “Gene,” she says decisively in the voice that has run a hundred committees. “I’m not even going to listen to any further nonsense. I’ll see you at the Royal Orleans on Saturday. I’ll be waiting in bed, with a little surprise for you,” she adds on the spur of the moment, without a clue as to what the surprise might be, but surely she’ll find something, maybe a bottle of very good champagne or some little something from one of the antique shops along Chartres Street. Or a hat from that wonderful hat shop, maybe a Panama.