by Lynn Austin
‘‘That pitcher of yours is quite a player!’’ my father said at the dinner table that night. It was the first comment he’d made about the game. I waited for more, unconsciously holding my breath while he cut a piece of beef, then chewed it thoughtfully. ‘‘I’d say you have a long way to go to be as good as he is.’’
Devastating words. I’d wanted to hear just one word of praise—‘‘Good job, son’’ or ‘‘I’m proud of you,’’ but my best efforts at baseball had fallen well short of the mark. I never tried out for the team again. I valued my father’s opinion above all others, and if he pronounced me a failure, then I saw myself as one.
During my sophomore year, one of my English teachers persuaded me to write for the school newspaper. ‘‘You write so beautifully—so flawlessly!’’ he insisted, and I lapped up his praise like a desert wanderer gulps water. I wrote for the school newspaper—careful, clean reporting that risked nothing of myself. I served as editor during my junior and senior years—the youngest student in the history of the school to earn that honor. My father never knew. I was terrified to tell him, terrified that he would pronounce my efforts rubbish and rob me of the worthiness I felt every time I saw my work, my name, in print.
My father’s hold over me grew steadily stronger as I grew older. By the time I graduated from prep school, my life revolved around his like a planet in orbit around the sun, held captive to his will by the relentless pull of his personality. I would say anything, do anything he wished. I would attend the college he’d attended, I would study to prepare for law school, I would one day pursue a career in politics. My father blithely ignored the fact that someone who stuttered as badly as I did couldn’t possibly succeed in either law or politics. He believed that by the sheer force of his will he could transform my tongue—his will had prevailed in everything else.
Writing courses were my favorites in college, and once again I secretly wrote for the school newspaper. My father never saw the journalism awards I won. Away from his influence, caught up in the excitement and challenge of campus life, I experienced my first faint stirrings of confidence in myself. I could write well. It gave me enormous pleasure to write. I wanted to spend the rest of my life doing it. I hated all the courses that would prepare me for law school. The prospect of taking speech class struck terror in me. And so I returned home at the end of each school year to a dreaded summer job in my father’s law office, determined to explain to him just how much I hated the idea of practicing law, determined to tell him the truth—I wanted to change my major to journalism.
The words never came. Back in my familiar orbit I became miserable at the thought of disappointing him. I needed his approval so badly I would do anything, say anything in order to get it. I silently returned to college each fall and continued preparing for law school.
I graduated with honors. At the commencement ceremony, I accepted my father’s nod of approval like a starving man accepts moldy bread—hungering for more but grateful for whatever crumbs I could get. I’d been accepted into the same law school that he and my grandfather had attended. I would start in the fall.
I worked in their law office again that summer, and with my father involved in an important upcoming election campaign, I often worked extra hours stuffing envelopes at party headquarters. My father had never invited me to observe the secret political maneuverings that took place behind closed doors, but shortly before I started law school, he ushered me into his smoke-filled conference room one night. The sight of so many important men seated around the table awed me, but the amazing words that flowed out of my father’s mouth that night struck me speechless.
‘‘My son has a talent for writing,’’ he told the other men. ‘‘He was the youngest student to ever serve as editor of his prep school newspaper, and his articles have won journalism awards in college. I think he’s the man to help us.’’
I had to lean against the table to keep from falling over. He knew! My father had known all along about my writing, and he wasn’t angry. But when he said the words I’d waited all my life to hear, it took my breath away.
‘‘Yes, I’m very proud of my son.’’
He was proud of me! It was the first time in my life my father had ever praised me, and he praised me to his peers. I flew so close to the sun, basking in the warmth of his adulation, that the brightness blinded me to the truth of what came next.
‘‘We need your help with something, son....’’
For the next several hours, my father and his cronies fed me slanderous information about one of their political opponents and I wrote everything down, sharpening and honing my prose until it became a lethal weapon. I willingly became their hit man, hired to assassinate their enemy’s character.
Two days later my article appeared in leaflets that mysteriously appeared all over the city. Of course, my father and his party members could truthfully swear that they hadn’t written those damning words—I had. As lawyers, they’d been careful not to be libelous, but my work was a masterpiece of innuendo and gossip that cast enough doubt in people’s minds to ruin the opponent’s reputation. He would lose his good name as well as the election.
What I had done horrified me. I had used words the way my father and grandfather did—corrupting them to hurt and deceive and destroy people. I’d prostituted the rules of good journalism, altering and shading the truth for power. I hated myself. But worse still, I hated my father. I’d allowed him to seduce me—violate me.
When I left home the following day, my father thought I’d gone to law school ten days early to settle in. Instead, I ran off to enlist in the army. I didn’t write to him until after I’d completed my basic training, until it was much too late for even my powerful father or grandfather to change anything. I wanted nothing to do with officer’s training, in spite of my college education. I joined the infantry with farm boys and immigrants’ sons, hoping to lose myself in the great rank and file of enlisted men.
Seven months into my enlistment, on April 6, 1917, America entered the Great War. The army sent my friends and me to France to serve in the American Expeditionary Forces under General Pershing. They paraded us through Paris on the Fourth of July, then dispatched us to training camps to learn the realities of sandbag dugouts and mud-filled trenches—conditions we would soon experience on the Western front.
They issued me a 0.3-caliber Springfield rifle to fight the enemy, but I had no weapons against the despair and destruction of warfare—no defense against the realities of headless corpses strewn like mangled dolls, of cities and forests reduced to rubble and charred stumps, of children starving. I endured the horror of watching individual lives—men I knew and loved—become nothing more than impersonal ‘‘forces’’ sacrificed for military objectives. I knew I could have wrestled these images into manageable proportions by writing about them, but I had committed murder with my words and now I had to suffer the full punishment for my crime. I would purge my sins at the Battle of Cantigny on May 28, 1918, at Belleau Wood from June 4 to June 26, and at St. Mihiel on September 12. That was where
That was where Gabe’s tale ended. It made upsetting bedtime reading. Added to everything else that had happened that day, I didn’t sleep one wink.
Early the next morning I tiptoed downstairs to the kitchen to make a pot of coffee. The fall air was chilly, perfect weather for putting a blush on my apples, but it made me shiver at the thought of the coming winter. I threw a few sticks of wood into the stove to make a fire, and as I lowered the cast-iron lid into place again I thought of Gabe’s story.
He must have heard me banging those lids shut every morning as he lay sick in my spare room. And if the story I’d read last night was true, the sound must have brought back painful memories. I recalled how Gabe had wept for his father the night his fever raged and had begged him for forgiveness. Tears came to my own eyes as I sat at the kitchen table, remembering how I’d left my own daddy in anger, too.
The spare-room door opened just then, and Aunt Batty came out
. She wore her canary yellow sweater over her nightgown, and her hair stuck up every whichway. I must have looked just as tousled and bleary-eyed as she did because she came and stood beside my chair to hug me, resting her cheek on my hair.
‘‘I didn’t sleep very well either, Toots,’’ she said. ‘‘I spent the whole night praying for that poor boy, praying that whatever it is that he’s wrestling with, God will help him do the right thing.’’
I realized that Aunt Batty still didn’t know everything I knew about Gabe. I hadn’t told her what Sheriff Foster had said. I couldn’t bring myself to say the words out loud yesterday. But Gabe had stolen Aunt Batty’s heart, too. She had a right to know the truth about him. ‘‘You’d better sit down, Aunt Batty. I need to tell you something.’’
She silently poured herself a cup of coffee, then sat down at the table across from me, stirring the sugar around and around with a teaspoon. I drew a deep breath, just like Gabe used to do when getting ready for me to doctor his leg. Saying the words out loud would probably rip my wounds wide open again, too.
‘‘The sheriff told me that Gabe used Matthew’s name and his identity when he lived in Chicago. It seems Gabe knew all about Matthew—his birthday and his parents’ names and everything else. I thought for sure he really was Matthew.’’
‘‘No, didn’t I tell you he wasn’t? Matthew lost the tip of his finger when he was a boy and it always looked so ugly. Gabe had very nice hands, didn’t he?’’
I stared down at the tabletop, trying in vain to erase the image of Gabe’s hands from my mind.
‘‘The police are suspicious, Aunt Batty. They want to know what happened to the real Matthew. He disappeared and they think Gabe had something to do with it. I snooped in Gabe’s bag and read some of his stories while he was still sick, and the sheriff was right—he knew all about Matthew Wyatt. He wrote about how Willie fell through the ice and died. And he described Frank Wyatt to a T. He knew that Frank wasn’t Matthew’s real father, too.’’
Aunt Batty pondered that for a moment before saying, ‘‘Maybe he met Matthew somewhere. Maybe Matthew told Gabe all those things.’’
‘‘But why would Gabe steal Matthew’s name and his identity? Sheriff Foster and Mr. Wakefield think he came here to steal the orchard from me.’’
She shook her head. ‘‘I don’t believe that. Gabe never pretended to be Matthew when he lived with us. He told us he was Gabriel Harper, a writer...and he really was a writer. He let me read some of his pieces. What on earth would a journalist from Chicago do with an orchard?’’
‘‘I found another one of his stories last night,’’ I told her. ‘‘He tried to burn it up in the workshop stove but it didn’t catch fire. He must have written it within the last two weeks because I just bought that notebook for him. This story said that his father was a big-city lawyer who wanted to make him into a lawyer, too. But Gabe wanted to be a writer so he ran away and enlisted. I don’t know if he’s telling the truth this time or not.’’
Aunt Batty sighed. ‘‘I once wrote about being captured by headhunters in the jungles of Africa and I’ve never stepped one foot in Africa—much less met anyone who was interested in hunting my head.’’
‘‘I just wish I knew the truth, that’s all. Couldn’t Gabe at least have told us the truth?’’
Aunt Batty studied me for a long moment, her hands encircling her coffee cup. ‘‘You’re in love with Gabe, aren’t you, Toots?’’
‘‘No...yes...Idon’t know!’’
‘‘He loves you, too.’’
‘‘How do you know that?’’
‘‘The same way I know you love him—it’s written all over both of your faces. I saw you both trying to fight it. But you can’t fight a force as strong as love. Walter and I tried and we failed miserably. I know Gabe must have had an awfully good reason to force him to leave you like this.’’
‘‘It sure would help if I knew what that reason was. I didn’t want to love him, Aunt Batty, because I was so afraid this would happen. God keeps teasing me, giving me what I long for and then snatching it all away again. My mama was right. She said love was just like cotton candy. It promises so many things, but when you try and take your fill, there’s nothing there at all. Only a sweet, lingering taste—if you’re one of the lucky ones. But I guess I’m not one of the lucky ones because right now love tastes pretty bitter to me. I’ve been thinking about it all night, and I’ve come to the conclusion that God must be punishing me for lying.’’
Aunt Batty looked at me as if she didn’t believe I was capable of lying. ‘‘What did you lie about, Toots?’’
Her faith in me stung my conscience like a hive full of angry bees. I knew it was high time I started telling the truth.
‘‘Everything! I’ve been lying ever since I got off the train in Deer Springs ten years ago. Sheriff Foster says Gabe lied to me in order to steal the orchard from me, and if that’s true, then it serves me right because I did the very same thing. I made Sam think I loved him so I could have a home here. I never told him the truth about myself, either. I’m an impostor, just like Gabe. And now God is paying me back for everything I’ve done....’’
Eliza’s Story
New Orleans, 1904
‘‘We are all strangers in a strange land, longing for home, but not
quite knowing what or where home is. We glimpse it sometimes in
our dreams, or as we turn a corner, and suddenly there is a
strange, sweet familiarity that vanishes almost as soon as it comes.’’
MADELEINEL’ ENGLE
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
The clearest memory I have of my mama is the day she took me to the circus when I was the same age as my Becky Jean. We had never gone anywhere before that day—only to the corner store and back, or to the big church on the next block once in a while. That was because my mama was very sick. Most days I would play alone in our room or watch people walk by on the street below my window while Mama slept, and I’d wait for her to wake up and fix me something to eat. She couldn’t eat much herself and she had grown very thin. She would sit propped up in bed sipping her medicine while she watched me eat, and sometimes a big silvery tear would roll down her cheek.
The week before we went to the circus Mama had started having nightmares. She woke up screaming that she saw snakes in our room and horrible creatures crawling up our walls, and she scared me so bad I started having nightmares, too. But the day we went to the circus she got out of bed much earlier than usual and poured herself a glass of medicine and said, ‘‘How would y’all like to go to the circus, Sugarbaby?’’ I never have forgotten the velvety sound of Mama’s voice or her slow, easy drawl.
‘‘What’s a circus?’’ I asked.
Tears swam in her eyes as she held her palm against my cheek. ‘‘My poor, sweet Sugar. Y’all don’t even know what a circus is.’’ She turned away and lit a cigarette, then crossed the room to her old steamer trunk. I loved our afternoons together when she would open that trunk and take out all her beautiful, shimmering costumes. They were made of smooth, silky cloth and covered all over with sequins and glitter and feathers and such. In one of the drawers Mama kept a little silver tiara, like a miniature crown, that glittered with make-believe diamonds. Whenever I felt sad or scared, Mama would take out that crown and let me wear it. She took it out that morning, too, and put it on my head. ‘‘My little angel,’’ she whispered.
One compartment in her trunk held sheet music, all yellowed and brittle with age. Mama’s hand shook as she sifted through the drawer, searching for something. I brushed cigarette ashes away as they fell on the pages, afraid they would catch on fire. When Mama didn’t find what she wanted in that drawer she tried the next one, pulling out a handful of faded programs.
‘‘See here? That’s me, Sugar. Yvette Dupre. The Singing Angel.’’
I stared for a long time at the picture of my mama in a long, sparkly dress. She wore her coppery hair piled high on her head with the little
silver crown nestled on top. She had been very beautiful before she got sick.
Mama turned the page to show me more pictures—a smiling man with a top hat and a cane, a funny-looking man with a big wooden doll on his lap. ‘‘I used to sing in the Vaudeville circuit,’’ she said. ‘‘That’s how I met your daddy.’’
I nodded as if I understood, but I didn’t. She exhaled smoke, then dug through the stack of programs until she found one with a group of men dressed in funny-looking clothes.
‘‘That’s Henri—your daddy—right there. Handsome Henri Gerard.’’
I squinted for a better look, but the picture was so tiny I couldn’t make out his face. Mama took another gulp of her medicine, then stared straight ahead for the longest time, her eyes empty and dark, her lips very pale. There was no life in her face at all, and that scared me. Sometimes she didn’t seem to remember who I was.
I touched her hand. ‘‘Mama?’’ Her fingers felt as cold as the bars of the radiator when our heat was turned off.
She finally gazed at me, then at the programs in front of her. She looked as if she just woke up and had no idea where she was or how she got here.
‘‘Mama?’’ I said again, pulling on her sleeve.
‘‘Hmm?’’
‘‘Is this the place we’re going to today?’’ I pointed to one of the leaflets.
‘‘No, Sugarbaby. We’re going to the circus.’’ She suddenly came to life again, remembering, and sorted through all the programs until she found the one she wanted. It had a fancy design around the edge and red letters that had faded to rusty pink. Mama pointed to the picture on the front. ‘‘See there? That’s an elephant, Sugarbaby. I know y’all never saw an elephant before, but they’re just the most enormous things! See how tiny that woman looks beside it?’’