The Last Girls

by Lee Smith

  They went to the river house on every visit to China Hill, from the time they built it when Catherine was eight until the year she was twelve, the year everything changed. It had been raining all that June and the river was up so high it covered the cypress knobs and the big round rock and the bottom of the willows, so high it lapped at the river house itself with a white frothy licking wave like hot chocolate with marshmallow topping.

  “Don’t you think we ought to move everything out?” Catherine shouted to Wesley over the sound of the rain on the roof. She was already hoisting the treasure box, but he shook his head, no.

  “If it goes, it goes,” he said flatly, staring out at the water. Huge limbs and logs floated past. Earlier they had seen a doghouse go down, spinning like a top. Then Wesley shaded his eyes and moved forward. In a flash he was out in the rain, hanging on to a willow, leaning over to scoop something up from the frothy tide.

  “What is it?” Catherine yelled out into the rain, but he ducked back into the house with the dripping box clutched to his chest.

  “What is it?” she asked again.

  “A hatbox, stupid.” Lately there had come this distance between them that was breaking her heart.

  “What’s in it?”

  “How do I know?”

  Wesley put it down on the floor and got out his new buck knife and started cutting the twine which securely bound it.

  “Look at all those knots,” Catherine said admiringly, over the drumming rain.

  Wesley cut the last piece of twine and pried up the top and closed it immediately, with a look on his face that Catherine had never seen there before.

  “What is it?” She came forward.

  Wesley shook his head.

  “I want to see.” She touched the box.

  “Listen, Catherine, you can’t see. Go on back to the house, okay? I’ll be there in a minute.”

  “Come on, Wesley.” She grabbed the box and pulled.

  “Damn it, Catherine, quit. Go on. Get out of here, okay?”

  “No.” She struggled with Wesley until the box slipped from his hands and fell to the plywood floor where the top popped off and a baby rolled out in a gush of bloody water.

  “Oh my God.” A feeling like a slow electric shock came over Catherine in a wave. She sat down on the floor and leaned over to peer at it. “It’s a girl,” she said.

  “Shit,” Wesley said.

  “We have to tell somebody.” Catherine was getting up now. The roar of the rain on the roof was driving her crazy, she had to yell to be heard.

  “No,” Wesley yelled back, and before she knew it, he had scooped up the tiny baby and thrown it back out into the rushing river, followed by the box. “Let’s go,” he said, stepping out into the rain. He didn’t come back, and after a while she followed.

  They never told.

  Pops had a stroke at breakfast on Easter Sunday the following spring while he and Gran-Gran were visiting them in Birmingham. By coincidence, Catherine’s period started that morning, too, only in the general rush of the emergency there was nobody to show her where to stick in the Tampax. Finally she figured it out by herself but when she came out of the bathroom, Mama had already gone to the hospital in the ambulance with Pops, siren wailing, and Gran-Gran was crying on the horsehair sofa in the wide front hall filled with neighbors. In Catherine’s mind, life has not slowed down since. When Pops died later that spring, they sold the farm so that Gran-Gran could come live with them in Birmingham, a big mistake since all she did was sit by the window and weep. She never dressed.

  As a teenager, Catherine was the apple of her daddy’s eye and the bane of her mother’s existence, messy and dawdling and daydreaming and talking on the telephone and taking up with all the wrong boys. She made A’s in art and C’s and D’s in everything else, defying her mother in numerous flagrant and sneaky ways until finally, in exasperation, Mary Bernice sent her off to St. Anne’s, in Virginia, in the wake of Wesley who earlier had been sent to Harmon Military Academy which was supposed to “make a man of him,” which didn’t work. At least Daddy eventually agreed to pay for Wesley to attend art school in Boston, when it became clear that he would never be a Phi Delt at the University in Tuscaloosa, like Daddy, or get his law degree.

  Catherine knew this was one reason Daddy had liked Howie so much, because he was a Phi Delt at W&L, because they could do the secret handshake. Russell thought this was hysterical when she told him about it. He laughed so hard she wished she hadn’t told; she’d always thought it was sort of sweet. Actually, Howie was sort of sweet, and actually, she’d sort of loved him.

  Catherine stretches again, and again. It’s nice to lie in this big bed alone. It’s already ten-thirty. Russell dressed and went without making a sound. Well, he is considerate, damn it, it’s a shame he’s driving her crazy. Anyway, it’s great that he’s gotten so interested in the Civil War, especially since it’s not even his war, being a Yankee and all, as she pointed out to him yesterday.

  “What do you mean, it’s not my war?” he demanded.

  “Well, you know …” Catherine’s voice trailed off in the way it does when she can’t find the words she means.

  “No, I don’t know. What the hell do you mean? Shelby Foote said that any understanding of the United States as a nation must be based—‘and I mean really based,’ he said—‘on an understanding of the Civil War.’ ” Russell has been reading Shelby Foote’s whole narrative history of the Civil War, big old book after big old book, to get ready for this trip.

  “I mean just what I said, it’s not your war. It wasn’t ever your war. You’re a Yankee. It’s the South’s war.”

  Russell walked off chuckling and shaking his head, to get her a mint julep. He thinks he’s a lot smarter than she is. Her other husbands thought this, too. Catherine has always believed it is to her advantage for them to think so.

  At least Russell agreed to go on the Vicksburg battlefield and headquarters tour today without her. Usually he makes her take every tour, every side trip, with him because he’s so afraid he’ll have a heart attack when he’s alone. But luckily he found out from the roster that there are forty-four doctors on board the Belle of Natchez this trip out—an entire group of doctors from Indianapolis. Unfortunately they are ENT doctors, not cardiologists. Russell loves cardiologists. But Catherine has reminded him that all doctors have done a rotation in cardiology, no matter what their specialty is.

  She knows this because of her second husband, Steve Rosenthal, a physician who was in the first year of his residency when she took her son William to the emergency room after he fell off the porch and cut his forehead. It was bleeding like crazy, and Catherine was a wreck, too.

  Dr. Rosenthal was tall and skinny, with a long, serious face and little round granny glasses which she had never seen before on a man. He wiped off William’s forehead and held a piece of antiseptic-soaked gauze on the cut, pressing him tight to his chest where Will miraculously quit screaming. Suddenly Catherine could not remember any time when Howie had ever held William or done anything else but walk out of the room when he cried. Dr. Rosenthal smiled his grave smile at her. “He’ll be fine,” he said. “It’s very vascular tissue, the head. He’ll need a few stitches, however, so I’m going to call in Dr. Erskine, who’s a plastic surgeon, to do it. You might have to wait a little while, but it’ll be worth it. No sense in him having a scar.”

  “All right,” Catherine said. She would have said all right to anything. When he handed Will back to her, Dr. Rosenthal’s nice white coat was all bloody.

  “Oh,” she said involuntarily. “I’m so sorry.” She reached out and touched his bloody collar. He looked down at her in a way no one else had looked at her before, a hungry, intent way. He was skinny as a pole. “Don’t you want to call anyone?” he asked.

  “No.” She was amazed that this was true. The thought of Howie crossed her mind, wearing a seersucker suit, and disappeared. It wasn’t working out anyway. He had liked the slapdash girl she was at
Mary Scott, but somehow she had not shaped up into the wife he had apparently expected. Ever since she’d had Will, in particular, she couldn’t seem to keep anything straight or get anything done—except play with Will, of course. Will was the best thing that had ever happened to Catherine so far. Now he sucked on her finger while she started crying again for no reason at all.

  Dr. Rosenthal cleared his throat and said, “I want to see you.”

  “All right,” Catherine said.

  Suddenly he leaned down and put his mouth against the top of her head, into her hair. “Shit, I must be crazy,” he said. Dr. Rosenthal turned on his heel and left with his giant ungainly strides, like some huge strange bird. Hours later, after Dr. Erwin finally came and sewed William up, and after Catherine had put him to bed and gone to bed herself beside Howie (who had been frantic, who was actually very nice, there was nothing really wrong with Howie at all), Catherine felt that she had simply made Dr. Rosenthal up, like a character in creative writing class.

  But then he appeared on her doorstep the next Wednesday morning in the middle of a spring rainstorm, dark hair plastered to his forehead, glasses streaming, carrying a dandelion. He held it out to her. “Surprise,” he said. First he looked stricken. Then he grinned at her.

  Catherine had been nursing Will. She leaned out the door and looked both ways, up and down Country Club Lane. Then she grabbed Dr. Rosenthal’s wet jacket collar and pulled him inside through the hall and into the kitchen where they both started laughing and couldn’t stop.

  Of course, when it all came out eventually, Mary Bernice was furious, summoning Catherine over for the official interrogation. Steven Samuel Rosenthal had come to medical school at the University of Alabama on a full scholarship, Catherine told her mother. His father was a butcher in Buffalo; his mother taught piano.

  “A butcher!” Mary Bernice spilled her whole cup of coffee onto her dining room table. “Oh dear. Fronsie,” she called, and Fronsie came to wipe it up.

  “You won’t have that,” Mary Bernice said to Catherine. “You won’t have any help at all. You’ll have a hard, hard time, because I personally will never give you a nickel. Not a red cent. Do you understand that, Catherine?”

  “Yes, ma’am.” Catherine held William on her lap. Sunlight came through the open window in her mother’s house. It felt good on her head, like somebody’s hand.

  “You’ll have to give up the Junior League,” Mary Bernice said.

  “I never joined.” Catherine had already moved out of the house on Country Club Circle and into married student housing with Steve, though they couldn’t get married, of course, until she was divorced. Catherine bounced William on her knee. “This is the way the lady rides,” she sang.

  “Whatever will people think?” Mary Bernice said, almost to herself. The doorbell rang in the hall and Fronsie answered it and there were voices, then the closing door. Everything was hushed in this house, and cushioned, and comfortable. Silver candlesticks gleamed on the dining room table. Catherine and Steve would never have any silver, since she’d left everything—the china, too—for Howie.

  “I always knew you’d be the death of me.” Mary Bernice sounded almost gratified.

  Thank goodness the little sisters married well and did not cause scandals, and so eventually Mary Bernice was mollified, if never entirely reconciled, to Catherine’s choice. She even seemed to enjoy visiting the grandchildren who arrived punctually every two years, dark curly-headed babies who looked nothing like their mother. “Steve’s little jewbabies,” Catherine called them, nursing Amanda, changing Page’s diaper, while blond William solemnly rode his red bicycle through the sprinkler. Mary Bernice kept her eyes carefully averted from the nursing; why wouldn’t Catherine use bottles? Even black people used bottles these days. “Mama, could you hold Amanda just for a minute while I get another pin?” Catherine asked, and Mary Bernice did, but then she stood abruptly when Amanda spit up on her shoulder. She thrust the baby back at Catherine. “This is just too confusing,” she announced. “I’m going home,” and stalked off in a wide detour around the sprinkler which made a rainbow over the back yard. But Mary Bernice always paid for the diaper service, and eventually she came to rely upon her serious son-in-law who would listen to her so intently when nobody else would. She declared he was “smart,” referring to him as “our psychiatric.”

  “Catherine doesn’t even bother to keep house,” Mary Bernice confided in her friends, “and our psychiatric doesn’t even care.” In fact, Steve loved to see Catherine out in the yard, surrounded by children—her own, the neighbors’—and plants. She built trellises and fences. She poured a concrete walkway. Steve encouraged her when she made the first heart-shaped steppingstones, then the suns and moons and cat-shaped steppingstones that would become her trademark. By then they had four children. They bought a big old house on the outskirts of town. Here Catherine made a fountain out of tractor seats, a porch rail out of antique bed frames, tables from old wooden doors with wrought-iron legs and inset tiles. She bought a welding torch and a kiln. Steve was gone a lot. He had chosen the state mental hospital over more lucrative private practices. He liked the big stuff, he said. He specialized in schizophrenia. In fact he was very excited about the clinical trials he was running for the new drug clozapine, when he was shot and killed in a robbery at the 7-Eleven where he always stopped for coffee on his way home. Five hundred people, all kinds of people, showed up at his memorial service. Catherine didn’t even know many of them. When it was over, she thought she would die, too. But she didn’t. She had to take care of her children, and she did, in the haphazard way she did everything. They fixed their own breakfasts, filled out their own permission forms. They went to school. They grew up. Catherine was working. Men occurred, then disappeared. She was working. Eventually she started making those big concrete women with mosaic tile dresses and hats. People bought them for crazy prices. One day a lawyer named Russell Hurt came by to discuss a commission, three of her concrete women for the courtyard in his new building. Three weeks later, he moved in.

  But Catherine’s whole life, even her life with Russell, seems distant to her right now, not nearly as real as the days when she used to wander the woods and fields with Wesley when they were kids. It’s all because of the river. If Catherine closes her eyes, she’s there yet and it’s morning, early morning, her sneakers are wet with dew. She smells the honeysuckle so strong as she climbs up the stile; she hears the pot-rack, pot-rack sound of the guineas back there in the foggy woods.

  Catherine props herself up on one elbow against the pillows and looks in the mirror which Russell took off the wall last night and set up on the chair at the end of the bed so they could watch themselves making love, which turns them both on. “I wish I had a movie of this.” How many times has Russell said this? How many times have they done it, over the past twelve years? Catherine can’t even imagine. And wouldn’t the children be shocked, really shocked, to know they still do it? Wouldn’t it “gross them out,” as “the girls” themselves used to say? It would gross out Johnny, the youngest, for sure. But, maybe not Amanda, who is more sophisticated, having worked in France for a year before entering graduate school in comparative literature, whatever that is, and who would have ever dreamed it? But certainly Page, now with her own twins and a busy lawyer husband to take care of, and certainly Will, in real estate with his father. Like Howie, Will works all the time. Howie will never retire, he’s a millionaire many times over by now.

  Watching herself in the mirror, Catherine lifts one heavy breast to her mouth and licks the nipple, sucks it just for a minute to get that little twang—like a single note plucked on a banjo—between her legs. She never was as intellectual as Anna and Harriet, was she? Or as focused and organized as Courtney. Actually, she was more like Baby though she didn’t know it at Mary Scott, she thought Baby was so wild then, never dreaming how wild she could be herself. She’s a middle-aged wild woman now. Oh, Catherine does like being married to Russell who is still
likely to put down his newspaper any morning and stare at her until she quits tidying up the kitchen and comes to him, or to just cancel his tennis game in the afternoon if he gets in the mood and Catherine is available. He will even cancel doubles. Catherine likes that. As she has liked having all the children, their many comings and goings and friends and dogs and muddy shoes and sweatshirts flung down in the hall, the phone always ringing, the TV on, the school lunch menu taped to the refrigerator, brownies to bake for the bake sale. Catherine loves her children, she loves her grandchildren, she still loves to paper a bathroom herself or move the furniture around, to cook from scratch. Catherine loved those lists that she made out every day when the kids were all at home, so many many things to do, she loved to write things down on those lists and cross them off knowing that there were always more, more things on the list for any given day than she or anybody else could ever possibly do. She did not mind. She just did what she could every day and then drank a gin and tonic and fed the kids and sat down to help them with their homework while Steve worked late. Catherine was prodigal with her energy, generous with her days. There were plenty of days. Years flew by. The harder she worked, the happier she was. Messy, spontaneous and exuberant, Catherine was as unlike the cool and glamorous Mary Bernice or even Steve’s mother, prissy little Claudia Rosenthal, as night from day.