Bettyville

  One afternoon, Big George—in a confiding mood—told me that before he met Betty, after he returned from the army, he had been in love with another girl named Betty whom he had planned to marry. She was “a beaut,” he said, like in a guy in a movie from another time.

  But she broke it off. And then he met his Betty, our Betty, the one he drew the sketch of, that young and lovely girl, tentative and uncertain. For years I have searched for that drawing he did as I watched, but it has long been missing. I think she may have found it and disposed of it or tucked it away in some secret place.

  On their first date, they went to the old Busch’s Grove in St Louis. He knew that night that he would marry her, he said. He made it into a sentimental story where everything turned out just as it should. “There was something,” he said, “a sweetness.” She ordered the cheapest thing on the menu. She was nervous. He was glad he had found the right Betty.

  My parents married on a scorching St. Louis day in August 1948. A small gathering with a cake from the Lake Forest Bakery. Bill Baker brought Mammy to St. Louis for the wedding in one of his crazy old cars, which broke down around St. Charles. Mammy said she was so hot waiting for Bill to fix that car she thought she was going to “upchuck,” a term I have never known used outside my family. Betty was twenty-six, too old, she said, for too fancy a dress or too lavish a ceremony.

  Afterward, they went to Chicago for the weekend. Sade Sizer took them to a restaurant with phones on the tables: the Pump Room. Betty called up Mammy and told her she was just about to eat a lobster.

  . . .

  I am standing in front of the church, hoping my mother is doing all right at the piano, that she won’t wind up hurt, that she will come out of that church looking like she did when she was younger. At a wedding of a daughter of one of Betty’s friends ten or fifteen years or so ago, my mother was maybe seventy-five or a bit older, but looked sixty or less. Big George was gone by then, and Betty, who no longer drove at night, refused to go “in a carload of old widows,” so I came home to be her escort. I was having a good streak, making lots of money at a publishing house where my books were hitting big.

  So I got on a plane, though I don’t much like weddings, which make me feel out of place, especially single.

  I told Betty that she looked better, more beautiful than she ever had, but she could not accept this, could not take it in. At the entrance to the cool, candlelit church, she reached out to touch the fresh flowers, in awe at the perfection of the preparations. “Hazel has outdone herself,” she said, “spared no expense.”

  My friend Lauren, who thinks she is Margaret Mead, says that weddings and funerals stir all kinds of things up in us because they are tribal occasions. I am not sure I have a tribe, though I think I have always longed for one.

  That night at the wedding, my beautiful mother wore a suit the color of key lime pie, her favorite. She actually seemed to want to have a good time. At the reception, after a few glasses of champagne, she took off her shoes and wandered through the crowd in her stocking feet, greeting old friends. She was swaying, but just barely, when no one was looking, almost dancing to the music. She touched my elbow once to steady herself. “Have you had some champagne?” I asked. “Mind your own business,” she said.

  “You are my business,” I said, as she had always said to me, all my life, in similar exchanges. I wanted her to feel as I did when I heard those words: protected, aligned with someone, connected.

  I want her to feel this way now.

  . . .

  Betty always says she misses my aunt June more than almost anyone. I miss her too, and can picture her standing up at her table at that wedding reception, rearranging some flowers in a centerpiece knocked askew, tucking little sacks of rice into her purse. She couldn’t walk well anymore, but pushed herself to come, wanting to be part of the occasion, more lavish than most held around here now. Bill had stayed home and June had on a diamond-encrusted brooch in the shape of a large turtle along with her other major gems, the jewelry that Bill rarely allowed her to wear in public.

  I wondered if June was imagining what Mary Ann, the daughter she lost, might have looked like as a bride. She looked left out, a little sad. I sometimes avoided my aunt, as she was the type to make reference on such occasions to my unmarried status. Or say something mortifying. I have always hated direct references to my way of being. Betty takes the easy way. Betty asks nothing. I prefer the easy way too, the approach that allows one to ignore every feeling until you are strapped in the back of an ambulance, screaming all the way to Silver Hill.

  “I would like to go to your wedding someday,” June said to me that evening. I knew it was coming. “I am truly grateful to have had love in my life. I hope you have love in your life.” She meant it all with caring, but I couldn’t take it. I hoped that no one would ever, ever again make me take them to a wedding. “Don’t make me uncomfortable,” I wanted to say. June was never one to pick up cues, not surprising. I am often subtle.

  The architect who married the guy with the Mohawk, the guy I was crazy about at this time, was on my mind. He had designed a farmhouse near a town on the Hudson for a friend of mine, a fashion writer. I had told her how talented he was, introduced them, essentially convinced her of his talent and got him the commission. I wanted to see the house. I want to see his work, maybe let myself imagine how it would be to live in a place he built, up by the river. I hinted. But he never invited me. After that, my search for companionship just stopped. I shut down without ever realizing it had happened.

  For a little moment, I wanted to tell June about this man, wanted to let her know that I had tried to find someone though I really never wanted to be married. That night at the wedding, because I knew the wishes she had for me made her sad, I wanted her to understand that for some of us there is nothing bad in having a less conventional life. I wanted to tell her things I wish I had said to my father. But all I could say was that Hazel wanted her to take home one of the centerpieces.

  All around that night at the wedding were people I had grown up with—friends of my parents, our lawyer and accountant, a judge or two, the bridge club ladies, people we had always known from church, those who used to run things around here. All my childhood was gathered around me. This was not just a collection of the elders of Paris, Missouri; it was more to me. It was Bettyville, my mother’s home, her place, with most of its surviving souls, those who had known her as a girl and who had been kind to me and watched me grow. They were older suddenly, much older, my people—men in white shoes fit for a bandbox, striped suits from other decades; women in outfits that looked to have been stored away and worn only occasionally—and all I wanted, all of a sudden, was to stay with them forever. I love my town; I love my home. I went from table to table to hug them as the younger guests spilled out of the banquet room into the summer night to dance on the patio. I thought of asking my mother to dance, but did not. My father would definitely have been dancing. But probably not with her. He had given up on things like that many years before. Betty was not a dancing girl.

  That night at the wedding where Betty was young again, the bride and groom headed out into the world. Hazel cried, big tears falling on her big, bountiful corsage. “She’ll have a hard time letting that one go,” remarked June.

  “That’s the way it is,” Betty said. “We’re old ladies now.”

  Overall, the evening seemed a kind of farewell to two women I loved who were leaving nights like this behind. Betty sat beside me, a row of silver bracelets on her wrist, surveying the scene, holding court as people came to greet her. She let some kiss her on the cheek as, behind their backs, she rolled her eyes at me and wrinkled her nose.

  On the way home, June praised the festivities, said Hazel had always been the type to “do it up.”

  “Didn’t you see their faces?” June asked my mother. “I know that look,” she said as I noticed in the rearview mirror, as the headlights
passed, Betty looking amused but fondly at her sister-in-law.

  “What do I know?” Betty asked. “I was an old maid.”

  “But you were so pretty,” I reminded her. “Lots of men must have asked you out.”

  “I didn’t fall into all of that so easily,” she said.

  When we pulled into June’s driveway, Bill’s face was in the window, waiting, on guard for the arrival of his wife, eager to help her out of the car and usher her safely back into their home. Bill didn’t like to let June out of his sight after it got harder for her to get around.

  “You okay, my dear?” he asked as he opened the passenger door, looking at me as if I could barely be trusted to get anyone back from a wedding without broken bones.

  . . .

  Bill Baker, when discharged from the navy, was unwilling to pay for train or bus fare. He hitchhiked from San Francisco to Missouri with the mumps. My picture of Bill is a young man, sick and running a fever, sticking his thumb up by the side of the road in some unfamiliar place.

  Bill Baker was never satisfied that he had properly appeased his lord, the God of Hard Labor.

  In March or April, ten years or so ago, one of the first warm days: Bill was clearing away things at an old building he owned. June, a few blocks away at home, was cooking his lunch when, without Bill’s noticing, the fire from the trash hit something flammable. A blaze began, spreading rapidly. Bill started to choke in the smoke; he couldn’t see clearly or get out. During his attempts to escape, his hands and arms were badly burned. The fire even singed his face, and as he lost his balance and fell, he suffered a heart attack and died. I went to the funeral for June’s sake. Bill and I had barely spoken during the previous few years. He had stopped addressing me at family gatherings, wouldn’t look me in the eye. On the phone, when I tried to engage him, he said almost nothing. Once he told me explicitly, “You don’t have to come to my funeral.”

  I didn’t, in the moment when he said that, feel anything. I was a master at monitoring reactions, not having them. I wished he hadn’t said it, but I knew why he did. When I was driving June home from somewhere, she pointed out the home of friends, people who had done business with Bill for years. “Their son died of AIDS. Bill wouldn’t go to the funeral,” June said, “but I did.”

  In his casket, Bill was outfitted in white gloves to camouflage the burns on his hands. After his funeral in Mexico, we went to Madison, where he was to be interred, and all the cars on the other side of the highway turned on their headlights to salute the hearse, something that is always done here. It was a rainy day and there was more than the usual traffic and it seemed to me that the trail of passing headlights went on for a mile or more as we drove past the fields, too wet and muddy for the farmers to get in and plant yet. In Madison, as June stepped out of the hearse, a man who had worked for my uncle for years at Mexico Equipment told her he thought he would never hear tell of Bill Baker riding in back of a black Cadillac with white gloves on.

  I carried in the centerpiece for June, that night after the wedding. She had grown attached to it, as if it were the bride’s bouquet and she had been the one to catch it. All I could think of that night was what would become of my mother and aunt. That the time was coming. It was my turn to step up. I told myself that whatever happened, I would do this one thing right, better than I had ever tried to do anything. Because even though my life was different, I wanted a place in the tribe. I still do.

  . . .

  Across the street from our church is the undertaker’s. As I wait for the end of the service to go into the sanctuary and help my mother gather up her music, I realize that the boy who was murdered in Mammy’s house may be lying inside. In the house on Olive Street where the shots were fired and the young man died, Mammy and her kids played cards in the kitchen and ate popcorn. They loved a game called rook. According to Miss Virginia, Betty had a fit if she didn’t win. “No one could tell Betty Baker what to do. She’d fly out and slam the door hard enough to be heard all over the neighborhood. Then came Harry, running out to chase her with Bill running behind him. Then came Marge. All four of them would be chasing each other around the house and I’d think, ‘Well, I guess Betty didn’t win the card game.’”

  . . .

  A few years ago, it became apparent that my mother’s boyfriend, John, a diabetic, couldn’t really take care of himself and Betty couldn’t see to everything. He moved to Monroe Manor, and although I took them out for steaks when I came home, Betty knew that their time was over. Last winter he had a stroke and died about a week later. My mother said his death was a blessing, a mercy. Bob, his dog, the beautiful German shorthair that my mother had fallen in love with, had gone to live with some people on a farm on the highway outside town. Betty worried about him, out there on the highway. Dogs that live by roads don’t fare so well here where the cars and trucks whoosh by without paying much attention to animals in their way.

  Betty took him bones and scraps, even on bad winter days, and never complained when he jumped up to greet her with his dirty paws. Then one night, after John was gone, in the midst of a terrible winter, my mother called to tell me that Bob had died. He had gotten loose from his pen and wandered into the woods and somehow frozen to death. There we were, my mother and I on the phone, not crying, but knowing that if we were people who cried, we would be doing it at that moment.

  “They say that freezing is the easiest way to go,” I told her.

  “Maybe,” she said, “I will just lie down in the snow.”

  . . .

  After John died, Betty told everyone she was okay, but she could not seem to rouse herself. Maybe he was more to her than I realized or than she could ever admit. Gradually, she went to the couch, stopped getting dressed, lost heart. In public and at family dinners, she had nothing to say. She was simply not herself. When I saw her begin to change, to leave us, I started coming home on visits that became more and more extended.

  . . .

  After waiting for a few minutes, I see people coming down the church steps and I go in to gather up Betty’s music and help her to the car. On the way back to the house, I ask how it went, and she shakes her head. “Fine,” she says. That is all she will reveal. “Fine.” But she is subdued and I can’t tell whether it’s because of how she played or whether she is still upset about our battle over the newspaper clipping the day before.

  I apologize again to her. “Do you want me to just treat you like some old lady who no one can hold responsible for anything or get mad at?” I ask. “Is that what you want? You have your struggles, but you have to realize there are other people. I’m here too, you know.”

  Her eyes widen as she takes this in. “No,” she said, “I have to be held to account, I guess. You’re right to hold me to account.”

  I am still not convinced she didn’t throw away the clipping on purpose. I know she hates me sometimes. How could she not? I am the guard at the prison she will never get out of. Sometimes I am just as pent-up and angry. I loathe her too. Just a typical American family, torn between love and homicide, but united in our way.

  “I’ll bet you did fine,” I tell her. “I’ll bet you sounded great.”

  But I cannot be certain if she did okay and I don’t want to hear if she has had trouble or hit a lot of wrong notes. I don’t want to lose the part of my mother I hear when she is playing the piano, her soft touch, the sweet music. I think that when she pulls the cover over the keys for the last time, all of this will be very hard to find.

  14

  Headed to the dog pound—a small, fenced-in area with a couple of cubbyholes for shelter and room for a few animals—I pass the spot where the city pool was, near the place where they hold the county fair, complete with livestock shows. I groomed no cattle, but was a lifeguard at the pool, which twenty or so years back was filled in because of filter problems. I ruled from my elevated chair, watching the boys and sending girls to the penalty box if I di
sliked their swimwear. “Do not come near me, young missy, in that little poncho with happy faces.”

  For the lonely dog, I have brought a stewlike concoction, but they have mended the hole in the fence and I can’t slide food or pie plates under the wire. The animals are not actually supposed to be fed; people poison them sometimes. I throw turkey dogs over the fence. Next the Milk-Bones go flying.

  My car has become a canine supply station. In the event of disaster, I could feed and nurture a pack of huskies. At PetSmart, I couldn’t resist a winter coat for dogs made from bright orange fabric that glows in the dark. It reminds me of an ensemble worn annually at Christmas by one of my high school teachers.

  In the backseat of our old Infiniti, sacks of rawhide chews are stowed alongside shopping bags overflowing with balls and treats, a huge sack of grain-free puppy mix, and a bunny toy that reminds me of Wesley Brown, who used to help Mammy in her garden. A strange man with a speech impediment, Wesley lived in a shack with an overgrown yard and kept hundreds of rabbits in battered hutches. Some of the creatures were older, big, and menacing. But my stuffed fellow does not look threatening and I may keep him. He doesn’t deserve to be chewed.

  The dog is dancing, making his yodeling noises, madly scurrying about. As he vomits up large chunks of turkey dog, I tell him things are looking up. Marci Bennett, who I have known forever, wants to take him. I am relieved, but resentful. I love this pup and he should be mine. Before Marci popped up, I could keep my fantasy. But it had to end. We would never work. I can’t commit. Not the way my life is now. He knows that I am about to desert him, barks and barks, eyes me suspiciously, particularly after the turkey dogs. Or perhaps it is the fact that I am clutching my bunny.

  My friend Lauren says that people who are emotionally reserved—frigid and icy, I believe she is implying—often lavish their feelings on dogs. She cites the English, well-known canine enthusiasts, and points out my English heritage. I feel like Camilla Parker-Bowles. “Charles, don’t worry about making it back tonight. Mummy’s having gin fizzes with the corgis.”